Windows 7 vs XP

[johnridley]

I put XP on my new machine, Saturday and Sunday as an experiment.

The install took three tries. The first time, I told it to install on the 80GB fresh partition that I created by wiping out the Win 7 partition. For some reason, the XP installer decided that it would be a great idea to make the second, existing partition the system partition, and that it would be swell if it was called drive L:. And you can't change the drive letter on system partitions.
The only way to stop it doing that that I could find was to copy the data from that drive somewhere else, unplug the other drives, kill ALL the partitions on that drive and then install to the one and only partition.

Anyway, I'm torn now on which version to go with in the long run. I feel MUCH more at home on XP, I can navigate without thinking about it, but it feels a little clunky. I think Windows 7 must use the graphics card's acceleration functions when rendering the desktop, because it feels much more smooth.

If only there was a way to get back to the proper Windows Explorer I would be back on 7 in a second.

Comments

[jvanhare.livejournal.com]

Bet it was faster!

[johnridley.livejournal.com]

Actually, no, it is pretty clearly slower under XP than 7. I'm thinking about moving back for this reason. XP is more familiar to me, and there are some things about 7 that continue to bother me, but 7 is absolutely faster.

[dave-ifversen.livejournal.com]

Since I've never used Windows Explorer, I couldn't even begin to tell the difference between the XP or Win7 versions.

The only thing I've found so far that I don't really like about Win7 is that it renders all the desktop icons large. I haven't found a way to shrink them down to the size I had on XP. I'm hoping that it's just a matter of me using the Release Candidate rather than the final version (which should be here *any day now*(tm)).

[johnridley.livejournal.com]

How do you navigate to files on your hard drive if you don't use explorer? Do you go to the command line to start everything?

I start up "my computer" and navigate around using it quite a lot, for managing file collections if nothing else. Sometimes the command line is easier, but often explorer is easier.

The large icons bother me too. And those are what they call "small"! You can make them even larger, but not smaller.

It's like we're getting higher resolution displays for nothing; we get higher res displays, and Microsoft makes everything gigantic so we can't fit anything else on the screen

One thing I noticed when I got back to XP was that even though I had just as many icons on the screen as before, I could find things much easier, because it hadn't blown the icons up to such huge dimensions that it still had room to print the text under them. And the text was clean and uniform.

[dave-ifversen.livejournal.com]

Ah - I never bothered to use the program that XP labels as Windows Explorer (the one that opens a window and shows all the drives and folders in the left "pane" or column, and all the folders of the selected item in the right pane or column). I just opened the "My Computer" icon and drilled down through to get to what I wanted.

I did, however, try again to exercise my Google-Fu, and found out how to change the desktop icon size for Windows 7. It's actually stupidly simple - give the desktop focus, then press the ctrl key and use the mouse wheel. You can make the desktop icons larger or smaller - I finally got them to be the size they were on my XP desktop. Looks much better now...

[johnridley.livejournal.com]

Uh, as far as I know, "My Computer" is Windows Explorer. It just may have the left pane turned off. That's just "classic view" and you can get it with one option ticked off. It's one of the first things I do when I install a new machine.

Awesome tip on the icon size. If I reinstall (I think I probably will, I need to just give up on this fight and see if I can instead learn to force Windows to be what I want it to be) I will definitely give that a try.

[jvanhare.livejournal.com]

Interesting to find it was faster, maybe they really cleaned up the code for this version, and got rid of the ever burgeoning bloat-ware that has become their OS. I have heard that Windows 7 is much faster than Vista.

[johnridley.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure that it's faster because it's skinnier. I think it's just as likely that it knows how to take full advantage of several GB of RAM, a 4 core CPU and a decent graphics card to make the system feel faster.

In any case, it doesn't much matter why it's faster, but it is faster.

Resizing Windows desktop icons (Win7 & WinServer2008)

[bwittig.livejournal.com]

Thank you! I was trying to figure out how to do this on Windows 2008 server, and Ctrl-Mouse_Wheel works there too!

(Now I have documented this in John's blog which is where every smart person looks first!)