Windows 8 Features Revealed

Fysh

PogMoThoin wrote: »

For me its instant, I use it all the time, my c drive is indexed, bet you've indexing disabled

That may be it, actually - I found indexing a pain in the hole on Vista and as I rarely use search anyway have probably also disabled it on 7.

Is there anything else Aero's useful for? From the wikipedia page on it all I can see are Jump Lists and Peek, and maybe Shake & Snap at a stretch. The rest of it just seems to be pointless (to my mind) eye-candy. (Though if nothing else reading this thread has led to me finding some additional Windows + shortcut combinations that will come in handy )

AlmightyCushion

Snap is handy for transferring files between two drives. Never use shake. Jump lists can be handy too. Peek is handy and some programs have controls in the little window that pops up. For example wmp has some of the media controls in it's pop up window. Also, I like the way when you are downloading or transferring files it shows the progress in the taskbar icon. Can't really think of any others.

PogMoThoin

Fysh wrote: »

That may be it, actually - I found indexing a pain in the hole on Vista and as I rarely use search anyway have probably also disabled it on 7.

Is there anything else Aero's useful for? From the wikipedia page on it all I can see are Jump Lists and Peek, and maybe Shake & Snap at a stretch. The rest of it just seems to be pointless (to my mind) eye-candy. (Though if nothing else reading this thread has led to me finding some additional Windows + shortcut combinations that will come in handy )

Vista gave a few great things over Xp.
The search (as long as you don't disable indexing) is instant and much improved over the clunky one in XP, its usable for everything now. I no longer use desktop shortcuts for programs, I just start typing the first few letters of the program name and the option comes up, the few I use lots (chrome, thunderbird) I've pinned to quicklaunch. There's no need for the all programs option in the start menu, but its there anyway.
Prefetch analyses how you use your programs and loads them into memory to have them ready. If you're in the habit of opening your browser at 9.00 every morning, it will have it in memory ready for you and it will load instantly. Open an email and need to open a spreadsheet, Office loads instantly. There's no point in having 4GB of ram with half of it sitting empty.
The task bar was advanced and then even further in Windows 7. It now stacks windows and gives previews of open programs and windows on hover. I use the Snap feature regularly to open two windows side by side.
These all make day to day tasks much easier.

Fysh

I'm prepared to believe that search (with the disk-killing indexing on) is better than it was in XP. At the same time, if I don't use search more than say once every six months, a better search system isn't much use to me

For software I use a lot, I use pinning to the taskbar and for the rest I either have a shortcut or I go through start menu.

Previews of application windows are nice, though to be honest given that I used to use the TaskSwitch powertoy on XP this wasn't that much of a new thing to me.

Snap seems handy alright, shake looks like more of a salespitch than a genuinely useful tool (why would you need to minimise windows in the background if you've already got what you need in the foreground?).

Prefetch and superfetch can both die in a car crash as far as I'm concerned - I've only ever noticed them slow systems down, though again I'm prepared to accept that this may be down to my usage pattern (well, mine and everyone else in the 130-odd people department where I work...).

PogMoThoin

Fysh wrote: »

Prefetch and superfetch can both die in a car crash as far as I'm concerned - I've only ever noticed them slow systems down, though again I'm prepared to accept that this may be down to my usage pattern (well, mine and everyone else in the 130-odd people department where I work...).

I don't fully understand what the problem is with pre-fetch, all it does is preload programs in memory in case you need them. It runs without any noticable slowdown as long as you've enough cpu power and some overhead ram. Ok lots of ram is used up, but its better than sitting there empty. Do the pc's in question have enough cpu power for Vista/7 or are they struggling, single core maybe? My experience of Vista/7 has been that it really needs dual core. Have they more than 1Gb ram? Even Xp need 1Gb minimum these days and ram is dirt cheap.

Why bother with Vista/7 if you're disabling the best features, why not stick with Xp? It would fly on the same hardware.

Fysh

PogMoThoin wrote: »

I don't fully understand what the problem is with pre-fetch, all it does is preload programs in memory in case you need them. It runs without any noticable slowdown as long as you've enough cpu power and some overhead ram. Ok lots of ram is used up, but its better than sitting there empty. Do the pc's in question have enough cpu power for Vista/7 or are they struggling, single core maybe? My experience of Vista/7 has been that it really needs dual core. Have they more than 1Gb ram? Even Xp need 1Gb minimum these days and ram is dirt cheap.

Why bother with Vista/7 if you're disabling the best features, why not stick with Xp? It would fly on the same hardware.

I haven't bothered digging into it in any significant depth - after noticing that several users complained after a few months of their Vista systems slowing down I started looking into system-intensive services and quickly found that disabling indexing and superfetch/prefetch improved things significantly. This isn't just on the lower-end machines but on decently-spec'd systems too. When it has a noticeable effect on a Precision T3500 with a decent Xeon and 6GB RAM, I can't dismiss it as a problem with the system spec.

Aside from anything else, I want people in my department using a reasonably current version of the OS in order to minimise support overheads, improve overall system security and ensure they're properly able to get the most out of their hardware. For things like hyperthreading, full TRIM support for SSDs, support for Intel HD-2K & 3K graphics, you're better off using a version of Windows that's not a decade old.

I'm happy enough overall with Vista and 7 - I'm just not convinced by certain aspects of the desktop UI that they incorporate. Mind you, that could be more about what the wonks in UI design think - looking at what's going on with GNOME and what happened with KDE circa KDE4 has me thinking it can't just be some eyecandy-fetishist team in MS...

PogMoThoin

But I've not noticed Windows 7 slow down like every other version of Windows has. Reinstalling for me used be a 6 monthly thing (from an image I take, with Acronis I can install that image in 10mins), now its a thing of the past, the installed Windows doesn't seem to slow

stevenmu

Superfetch and search indexing were horrible on Vista, disabling them made it noticeably more responsive. When I started using 7 I disabled them again at first, but I've since enabled them (on a few machines from high to low spec) with no noticeable performance hit.

I have indexing disabled but am using an SSD so I don't notice any slowdown. The only Aero features I use are peek and the media controls in the taskbar preview in some apps. I hate snap with a passion and have it disabled. I also don't pin anything to the taskbar. I don't want to use my taskbar as an OSX style Dock so I just pin them to the Start menu instead.

I've been using Windows 7 for nearly 18 months now and the only real feature I miss when on XP is the Start menu search, though that's easily worked around with Winkey+R in most cases. I hate the UI but I still get the benefit from the modern features such as support for SSDs and less codec woes (I could never find a H.264 codec for XP that would play every MP4 I threw at it whereas I don't have that problem in 7).

Overheal

PogMoThoin wrote: »

But I've not noticed Windows 7 slow down like every other version of Windows has. Reinstalling for me used be a 6 monthly thing (from an image I take, with Acronis I can install that image in 10mins), now its a thing of the past, the installed Windows doesn't seem to slow

I've had 7 on the laptop for a year and a half now, going strong as ever. Vista, meanwhile, I reinstalled about every 4 - 6 months. It was awful, something was woefully wrong with the way that OS handled hard disk stuff. After 6 months you could see about 20GB of "Unknown Data" in your windirstat. And it just. kept. growing. And the desktop is just has happy with 7.

stevenmu

Karsini wrote: »

I have indexing disabled but am using an SSD so I don't notice any slowdown. The only Aero features I use are peek and the media controls in the taskbar preview in some apps. I hate snap with a passion and have it disabled. I also don't pin anything to the taskbar. I don't want to use my taskbar as an OSX style Dock so I just pin them to the Start menu instead.

I've been using Windows 7 for nearly 18 months now and the only real feature I miss when on XP is the Start menu search, though that's easily worked around with Winkey+R in most cases. I hate the UI but I still get the benefit from the modern features such as support for SSDs and less codec woes (I could never find a H.264 codec for XP that would play every MP4 I threw at it whereas I don't have that problem in 7).

I guess it's different strokes and all that.

I love snap, especially when using multiple monitors, it's great for unsnapping a window from one screen, dragging it to the other and snapping it to maximised again. Pretty handing to snap two windows side by side to copy/paste as well. (though I'll admit it's a little annoying when you want to just position a window somewhere and it keeps trying to snap).

I love the new taskbar as well, I'd have probably 8 to 10 of my most commonly used apps docked to it. And when you've a load of applications open it makes them much easier to organise. Even just being able to reorder them is very useful, I used to use a 3rd party tool to do that in XP which was good, but just not quite as good.

I've grown to love indexing and search too. This was a big leap for me, I've seen how much indexing can slow down an XP or Vista system so I didn't enable it for ages. I've always been a big Win+R user and keep most of my files in organised folder structures so didn't really see a need for it either. But the near instant searches are fantastic, and in general I find the start menu searching to be quicker and easier than Win+R. I still do use Win+R for jumping to specific folders, the autocomplete of folder paths is excellent, but for most things the start search is much better.

Capt'n Midnight

probably worth a read http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/06/08/a_beginners_guide_to_windows8/