Things Windows 7 does that Vista doesn't | Hacker News Reader

Things Windows 7 does that Vista doesn't

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16 pointsblazzerbg24 comments

17. Native ISO Burner. I haven't used Windows in about 5 years, but it still amazes me that this was not baked in to Vista. My parents purchased a Vista desktop computer a couple months back. My dad called me on day 2 asking me how to burn a cd. He gave up on Vista after day 3. The awesome dual core Vista box sits and collects dust while he continues to use his XP (1 Ghz) computer where he has Roxio or some other crap already installed/setup.

imgburn - free burner software

The only thing I see as genuinely innovative their is the "problem solver" taking screencaps for every mouse click then creating a webpage and allowing commentary to be added. Seems like a nice little utility app - I'd like to see that in ksnapshot.

The other things, MP3 preview, recently used lists (now with added marketing-ese), window placement, .. hardly revolutionary.

They added a seamless VM to ease upgrade from XP, nice one (but not really innovation, I can have my virtualbox run seamlessly (but prefer it windowed)).

Any reasons there to upgrade from Vista or XP? I didn't notice one.

Ha. In the first picture of the article, the Explorer “jumplist” shows a directory named “20 cool things windows 7 does th...”. This article only lists 18. I guess the list was hard to fill?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Features_removed_in_Windows_7

I dunno, since I switched to a tiled window manager, these types of "lists of cool features in ..." have become so anticlimactic for me.. most of those features just aren't that useful once you go get used to tiling.

But Windows 7 introduces several window tiling features to the masses! Try dragging a window to a screen edge -- it makes it really easy to tile two windows.

I demand hardware acceleration for my xmonad!

You joke, but... my work laptop (Dell D630) has some low-end intel video card, and it can't even drive dual monitors. The redraw when I switch between workspaces -- which I do a lot, especially when on the built-in screen -- is painful :(

Not impossible. Not sure how much you'd gain from it, but I certainly wouldn't complain :-P

Yay native ISO burner! Also, the Windows Explorer built-in .zip file manager isn't freaking slow anymore (though 7-zip still puts it to shame with speed and compression ratios).

Presumably they don't want to add bloat by allowing more than one compression type, sticking in a free tar.bz2 compression routine would break the bank too I expect.</thinlyveiledsarcasm>

Yep, because they care about bloat.

That's sort of the point of windows 7 isn't it? It's faster, smaller, and needs less resources.

But if they had a faster .zip compressor and/or a different format like 7-zip, it would be faster and/or need less resources.

But it won't let you mount an ISO to view files inside, or create an ISO so you still need the addin tools

The article should really be called "18 things you never thought for the life of you would not be included in Vista that we will present as if they are groundbreaking features"

This is silly. I use OS X all day at work and can't WAIT to get home and work on my Win7 box where switching between applications, changing their size, and navigating within the window isn't a royal pain in the ass.

Because each product version should contain all features from all future releases?

The problem recorder seem cool, I will have to use it when making tutorials here at work.

I think we need an "X number of things every other popular operating system does that Windows doesn't" article. To start off:

  * Multiple users on the same machine at the same time
  * Software repositories
  * Useful software pre-installed (windows doesn't have IM, office tools, or photo editing software)
  * Advanced filesystems available

The "Imagine Parallels on Mac OS X without the need to fish out money on an extra OS" comment regarding XP mode strikes me as a bit disingenuous. The more apt comparison I think would be Classic/OS 9 or PowerPC compatibility - which Apple did provide for free (Classic mode and Rosetta).

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The "more or less" is the important part here :-D

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