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Comment by dcurtis | Hacker News Reader

What? This is totally false. Windows 7 is a great step forward from Vista. They have removed all of the crap that was bloating the OS and pissing off people who like XP. It's the XPificiation of Vista, and they managed to pull it off.

They made changes to the UI that I think, after using Beta 1 for a few days, are in the right direction. It's still Windows, of course, and it has some weird quirks, but it's still beta.

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The point of this article is that one of the problems with Vista and now Windows 7 is that people were so used to the XP way of doing things, even if the XP way was stupid or unintuitive. If you take some time to learn the new UI it's a lot better. Same with Office 2007, the old Office menu system was horrible unless you knew exactly where everything was, whereas with the Ribbon/Fluent UI most of the time it adapts for the specific features you are currently using.

XPification is a stupid analogy because XP was just a paint-job on 2k to make it palatable for non-business users. Most of the people who "like" XP are just too used to it; XP was the longest running consumer version of Windows (skipping Server 2k3) and probably the first consumer version that wasn't horribly crash-prone. A few are annoyed at the increased resource usage but don't realize how much hardware specs have increased in the 5 years between XP and Vista; using the Moore's Law rule of thumb specs should have increased by over 8x so it makes sense that it uses more resources as appropriate.

This is what I don't get. Why should I have to retrain my fingers to justify Microsoft's UI designers' salaries? I don't mind for myself, but I dread having to teach my parents every time, especially when I don't use the operating system myself.

Honestly, for me it comes down to two simple facts.

1) I would like an OS would a better UI. 2) I don't care if it bugs you/others that they need to relearn some tasks if the UI is changed.

Obviously I don't think that change for nothing but the sake of change is a good idea, but in the case of Vista I prefer it over XP.

Yes, you should be willing to explore new interactions as computing power increases. Many advances made over the years were due to such increases in computing power. Take for example: the mouse, the windowing UI, desktop search, and spatial navigation (this one hasn't really happened yet). Each item on that list required more power than was available to the previous OS iteration. Are you suggesting that this progression has stopped and our "WIMP" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WIMP_(computing)) paradigm is the ultimate interaction with our computer?

I'm not saying that Windows 7 is leaps and bounds better than XP, but essentially that's the argument you are making. Or did I miss something?

Tell them you do not know it and cannot help. Offer to help with the OS you do use. My father is very happy using Linux (Mandriva).

As the article points out, you can set everything to act like XP. It also gives good rationalization for all of the changes discussed.

What UI changes aren't in Vista? The stuff he highlights is a lot of why I prefer it to XP.

And the thought of Vista's UI with XP's responsiveness makes me pretty excited for 7.

How do the resource requirements compare?

There isn't anything for Windows 7 in the relevent section of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_Microsoft_Windows...

Well, when it was demo'd at PDC, it was on a Netbook, and it was still snappy, and had the eye candy. (http://arstechnica.com/journals/microsoft.ars/2008/10/28/ars...)

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