From what i've heard it's getting good feedback, and they may have finally straightened out some of vista's bugs. But the real news is they're giving away licensed copies of XP (running under Virtual PC), with expensive versions of Win 7.
http://community.winsupersite.com/blogs/paul/archive/2009/04/24/secret-no-more-revealing-virtual-windows-xp-for-windows-7.aspx
At first i thought "well... they know it's shit, and are giving away what people want [XP]. What a joke", but the bigger issue is this, and it's positive. The Windows code base is a ponderous mess because they've always offered backwards compatability. By including a virtual box for legacy programs (especially business apps) they can cut that shit out of the new operating system, and finally move forward. Security, bugs, performance and UI consistency should all benefit.

To what degree they can achieve this is debatable however. Obvious problems i can see are
1. Gamers are still in the cold as virtualisation is of negative
benefit to them, and gamers made microsoft imho.
2. Windows still has UI-design and strategy issues that are unresolved, which are huge issues the company has
never had to properly address before, unlike Apple.
3. Removing legacy functionality from the core OS ~will~ hurt people, and do they have the will to really do it ? 

> technically the windows "show desktop" feature is
> togglable. I was using windows-M, which is literally
> "minimize all"

Doesn't shift-windows-M un-minimize them ? 

I've just learnt something...

That's very useful. Thanks! 

Always behind whichever the curve is, but this sounds like its worth it. 

I'm going to ditch Windows and install Archlinux now instead. See you next week! 

Vista is alright but damn is it slow doing some basic things. My work machine takes no less than 10 minutes to get from from power up to "ready to work" state. And most of that time is spent after I log into Vista.

Only possible explanation for this is that you have a really silly amount of software set to launch upon logon and this would slow down the boot process of any OS to a crawl.

My home desktop (which is well average by today's standards: E6600 2,4 Ghz, 4 GB ram) goes from cold boot to a usable Vista desktop in under a minute. Even the retarded Fujitsu testbed machines we have at work with 1-2 gb ram launch in under 1,5 minutes and this is with Antivirus and all the regular crap. 

My nearly 7 old Windows desktop is 2 Ghz.

You'd think in the last 7 years that the CPU speed would have evolved more. 

i think there are some design limits that single CPUs have hit in recent years, that's why everything is switching to multi-core. 

Only possible explanation for this is that you have a really silly amount of software set to launch upon logon and this would slow down the boot process of any OS to a crawl.
Not really. It's a work machine. We have a virus scanner and a messenger app and that's about it. There's nothing in the task tray that would explain 10 minutes of disk thrashing every reboot.

This is AFTER you've logged in, mind you. You've entered your password and you're now at the desktop. However, the machine won't be usable for another 5-10 minutes. 

Willem used quote tags!

Have a beer ;) 

We use a similar one. 

Archlinux was easy to setup and runs so very nice.
And thanks to Linux I could transfer all my settings by simple copying files over. 

Archlinux was easy to setup and runs so very nice
What's good about it ?

Check out the new console bootup logo (for linux-2.6.29.x only)

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_E2tJnrV_I64/ScE50948gHI/AAAAAAAAABk/9L_wYatqYJc/s1600-h/tuz.png
http://www.flickr.com/photos/stibbons/3216251461/
http://torvalds-family.blogspot.com/2009/03/new-logo.html

Took a little effort to set up since i'm not actually using a 2.6.29.x kernel
(enable vesa framebuffer support, copy logo_linux_clut224.ppm to [kernel_source]/drivers/video/log , "make bzImage" and install new kernel adding this to grub "fb vga=0x315 video=vesafb:pmipal" )
but i now have a graphics enabled console and a cute tuz (tux tasmanian devil) logo. 

Archlinux is very minimal and does (mostly) only what you tell it to. That means I have a lightweight system that does everything I need without bloat. It needs 15 seconds to boot and is fast and snappy (using XFCE as desktop).
Installation and setup was actually easier than Debian (ok, that was some time ago and I am more experienced now). Things like the sound (OSS) or CPU frequeny scaling worked immediately.

The only drawback is that pacman is very inferior to aptitude (no menu for example), there are much fewer packages and using the user-repository ("AUR") requires using a different tool plus packages seem to be often broken or outdated. On the other hand the AUR contains a lot of proprietary software and other things (games) that now are easier to install than on other distros. 

apple owns http://dvlabs.tippingpoint.com/advisory/TPTI-09-04 

Fixed. :)

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT3549 

http://blog.cr0.org/2009/08/linux-null-pointer-dereference-due-to.html

I havent read it up

Since it leads to the kernel executing code at NULL, the vulnerability is as trivial as it can get to exploit: an attacker can just put code in the first page that will get executed with kernel privileges
....
On x86/x86_64, this issue could be mitigated by three things:
* the recent mmap_min_addr feature. Note that this feature has known issues until at least 2.6.30.2. See also this LWN article.
* on IA32 with PaX/GrSecurity, the KERNEXEC feature (x86 only)
* not implementing affected protocols (a.k.a., reducing your attack surface by disabling what you don't need): PF_APPLETALK, PF_IPX, PF_IRDA, PF_X25, PF_AX25, PF_BLUETOOTH, PF_IUCV, IPPROTO_SCTP/PF_INET6, PF_PPPOX, PF_ISDN, but there may be more. (Update: See RedHat's mitigation)
 

at least three days ago :( 

Imho there is absolutely NO reason to switch to win7 when you have vista that runs without problems. I won't spend M$ tax two times for more or less the same.
Gfx perfomance seems to be identical.
http://www.guru3d.com/article/windows-7-vs-vista-vga-game-performance/7 

Willem: it's not the OS (unless it is bad configuration) more likely the network or the machine. I use Vista on a 2Gig Pentium 4 and I am up and running in just over 2 minutes, and I have loads of unnecessary things on startup.

rudl: I agree. The same was true of XP over Vista. But I will say that I have been running Win7 on my laptop for about 4 months and have had no issues at all. Admitedly, I don't use it for games but I do use it for mapping (and FQ for testing) and Photoshop. 

Not really vista/win7 is more like W2K/XP
not like Xp/Vista
Xp lacks of DirectX10 and DirectX11 is supposed to run with Vista aswell.
And there is really no reason to use windows at all if not for games and cad stuff^^ 

win 7 have all the drm stuff vista has? 

google it, seems to be worse than vista 

The people whining about DRM seem to be really confused regarding what having DRM support in an Operating System actually MEANS.

If you are using content that does not involve DRM, it does not, in any way, shape or form matter if your Operating System supports DRM or not, you are just playing back non-DRM content and thats all there is to it.

It's really simple really: if your OS has DRM support, you can use content that requires DRM support to be present. If your OS does not have DRM support, you cannot use that content. An example of this is BLURAY playback.

Note, that I am not an advocate of having content shipped with DRM built-in, I am absoluitely against it. However, you absolutely DO want your OS to support various existing DRM methods, because the other option it to simply not have any way to use DRM'ed content that requires it. 

well nobody here is whining about it, but that does not mean that i have to like it.