Windows 7 Reviewed on CNet

I'm using the beta version and haven't had any problems running any games.

I also have been running the beta for quite some months and have encountered no noticable problem so far. Some drivers might still be in development but so far everything on my PC works great and it will only get better as soon as W7 goes live for the big audience. I've especially been pleasantly surprised by driver support, problem finding and solutions and the general 'how soon can I find what I want to do'. In XP I generally had no problem doing what I wanted to do because I got used to the options soon enough, but I often had to skip 9 options when all I needed was the 10th. In W7 the 10th option I needed is often the top option now, so I can just get to what I want in a few clicks.

I find myself booting into RC1 to do some things that Vista sucks at. (like copying a lot of files ... or even a few, for that matter!)

I already pre-ordered my copies!

Yay, finally a version of Windows to which I might/will pursade my parents to buy

I'll pass.

@ mooster

Actually that would be a wise idea. Assuming that your parents are the type of user that neither cares or knows about how PCs work they'd (or in case you are their helpdesk, you too) roughly have 3 advantages:

1) better safety, which well.. needs no explanation. Compared to the old win98 days it's a lot harder to get a virus, although certainly not impossible. I've gotten PCs with over 100 virusses from family before, I'm pretty sure it'll never get that far anymore with W7. I think the average user would actually have to do some seriously wrong stuff to just get one now.

2) great stability. I never really blamed Windows much for crashing, since it's usually the fault of bad hardware/drivers, but I'm happy to say that drivers will not bring down the entire OS anymore when they crash. Once again, it's not impossible, but instead of BSODing Windows will now just report a driver crash and continue to work. I generally prefer stable drivers so I never have many crashes at all, but I had one in an earlier beta of W7. Windows just reported the crash and kept on working. It will not solve bad drivers, but atleast it won't crash the OS and thus lose your newly typed Word document anymore either, which should be a big plus for most users.

3) no more annoying UAC. If you ever used Vista then you know how annoying UAC can be. In the end most people switched it off completely just to get rid of those horrible prompts, thus removing all of the protection too. In W7 you can have UAC on and not get bothered by those messages much. They are still there, many times they should be, sometimes in my opinion I shouldn't have gotten a prompt (for instance every time I start CCleaner or my Defrag program I get a prompt) but you can fiddle around with UAC settings to change that to a setting where you get as much protection possible with as minimal annoyancies.

Since Windows has 95 percent of the desktop share I give it 2 years or less and you will see plenrty of viruses for Windows 7.

Ive use windows 7 Rc and I like it.  But im not ready to abandon xp yet.

I'm not saying there won't be virusses, that's pretty much a given. But they will be able to do less damage.
Windows 7 has better sandboxing, better protection out-of-the-box and gives the user more feedback about what software is trying to do what. Not that it will be the be all, end all change in Windows, but it'll certainly cut down on the open virus floodgate that we know from years ago.

Do less damage? The newer viruses will do just as much damage as they can. That's the point. Find a way to damage an OS as much as you can. I doubt it will cut down on the virus floodgate. In fact just saying stuff like that will make the virus writers try harder to cripple Windows 7.

I'm sure they will do all the damage they can. But that's just the point. As an OS you can restrict what a virus can and cannot do, atleast to a certain point. Simple - yet extreme - example: if you do not allow applications to write to your harddrive then they cannot infect your system (I'm sure if you twist my words you could come up with some cases to claim otherwise but this argument is just to give you an example). A 'system' as we use it has many abstraction layers. A virus needs to have access to the lower layers to 1) stay hidden, and 2) do as much damage. So, simply put, if you refuse virusses to access lower layers (sandboxing is a pretty standard but good way for this) then they cannot do much damage. Yes, there will probably be some virusses that can still get in deep enough to do what they want but it will get exponentially harder for them to do so and in turn the actual number of virusses that will do so will drop fast.

Once again, I'm not saying that virusses will no longer exist, but if you implement 3 barriers that each blocks 90% of the virusses you'd already have eliminated 999 out of 1000 virusses. That is nothing but a good thing.

Actually there is little mileage in virii doing 'damage'.  Their 'profitability' to their authors is in subterfuge....do no VISIBLE harm....just duck in and 'borrow' your info/identity/whatever without your notice [or that of your AV proggy].

But Windows doesn't block anything. People run Windows under admin most of the time. Your telling me Windows 7 is different?

Still  - I'll pass.

That's why most viruses need a trojan, or activation by yourself to get onto the computer to start with.  The OS isn't designed to just pull them off the internet and install them all by itself.

Yes it does. Maybe not in ways you know of, but it does.

Yes and no. First of all I want to agree with you that running windows as an administrator is a bad idea, and it was a bad design choice to begin with. As far as I can tell from Windows 7 now you are technically an administrator, but you do not have unlimited access to all data and resources. In other words, Windows says "Hiya, I recognize you as the owner of this computer and you have access to it all" but when you try to do dodgy stuff it asks "Oi! You may be the owner but something on the computer is trying to do stuff that it shouldn't. Do you really want to? If so then I need to see some credentials [password, authorization]". I'm not entirely informed about the internals of W7 policies so I might be off a bit here, but this is how I understand it works at the moment.

I really wanted to get into Windows 7 already. question is, when will it be running stable enough??

You can download Release candidate version for free. And it's stable.

(You can use it till next year's march or smth.)

I have been using that RC versions since release on 3 different computers.

Great is also, that you don't need decent computer to run it.

Best thing is, that it instals drivers itself.

 

It's "stable enough"...right out of the box.  Most users won't even see an issue with it...even with the RC...which is 500 points behind the RTM version [7100 vs 7600 vers]...;)

Try it.....you'll probably just ask "why couldn't MS get it quite so right years ago?"...;)

To be honest, I've heard nothing but praise for Windows 7 which is fantastic considering what Vista received at it's launch. And no matter how good any operating system is, people who understand the way it works are always going to find ways to mess with it. A combination of personal education and maintence of your computer and a sufficent operating system security procedure is about as good as you can get for a home computer.

ZehDon a very true and direct to the point comment.

They're merely waiting for the official retail release.. then all the abhorent flaws will be revealed in all their glory...

No way it's as stable as XP SP3...

I will not be able to test Windows 7 till next year perhaps.

I have been using W7 for over seven months now and I must say it is what I expected with XP to be honest. It is without a doubt M$ OS opus. If it was 64b only life would be good on the PC front.

Yes way.  If you really haven't had any first-hand experience with it, you really can't go around and act like you know how stable it is or not.