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[Trev]

Microsoft is either destroying browser competition and then legally prevented from competing or it's not doing enough. Love 'em or hate 'em, Microsoft played a key role in making computing ubiquitous throughout the "developed" world.

[runequester]

I imagine IBM might have had something to do with it too

[Thorham]

Originally Posted by dreamcast270mhz

And windows still lacks: A good web browser built in (IE is always years behind the times), easily used multi workspaces (like Ubuntu classic), a good built in media player, well designed interface as aqua kicks it in the balls everytime. Sometimes I wonder how they make money.

Simple: For most people Winblows works well enough, allowing them to do what they want. Browsers and media players are easily downloaded and installed, so that's no problem either.

[asymetrix]

Originally Posted by Roj

Just for example, my father has hearing and vision problems. When he visits and wants to watch a movie, I turn on subtitles and set the subtitle font size to something ridiculously large for him. If I forget to change the settings back to normal, my wife won't watch movies because subtitles ruin the show for her. She's not savvy enough with tech to change the settings herself*, so she just does something else instead.

You should not have to change settings each time, that why Windows has user logins to keep different settings for each user separately.

Create a login for each user and set them with the settings you want, switch user login when a different person uses the system.

good luck

[Trev]

@runequester

Nah, the revolution occurred in spite of IBM. The publishing of the PC BIOS was really an oops.

[KimmoK]

I'm annoyed how slow windows has grown. At work we still use XP, win7 should come at the end of this year.
On some 2.4Ghz Core2 IBM laptop evertything is a little bit like slow motion. The CPU performance does not seem to be enough for fluent word processing. Luckily coding in text editor (I use notepad++) is still fast. Web browsing is not much faster than on SAM, etc.
Well, I hope I get new HW for win7. The GPU of this sh*t can only output 1650x1000 or something, not good enough to use big LCD display for coding.

On our tester PCs we have more CPU performance, but because windows still can not cope well with serial devices, when a lot of instrumentation control is ongoing, that HW is even slower than this laptop. CPU looks idle but something is causing the system to crawl (I suspect some USB drivers put kernell to it's knees). And windows on those Agilent(etc) scopes/analyzers etc... it's amazing that they still use it. Wait minutes for the meter to boot, wait after every button press for the meter to react....

[Roj]

Originally Posted by asymetrix

You should not have to change settings each time, that why Windows has user logins to keep different settings for each user separately.

Create a login for each user and set them with the settings you want, switch user login when a different person uses the system.

good luck

That could "fix" the problem, but it's neither a handy nor pretty way to do it. If I were to create an account for everyone who interacts with my Windows system and wants even a minor, custom setting for anything, I could wind up with over 25 accounts. Yuck.

[danwood]

Originally Posted by Trev

@danwood

Drag and drop into the application itself?

Works in apps that choose to support it, sadly, not all do, or they have inconsistent behaviour, dragging a file into an open Wordpad window results in the icon being embedded in the text Window, not the text itself!

[rvo_nl]

Reading some comments here I cant help but think you are all still using a very old version of Windows. Some of you are even comparing it to AmigaOS, which is plain ridiculous. For example; okay, so Windows lacks a way to save multiple sets of preferences for videoplayers, in the way the Amiga does when saving screenmode prefs, for example. But do you all realise its not even possible to play back any modern video on an Amiga, even without subtitles? Windows may not be perfect, and for sure is not much 'fun' to use (like AmigaOS) but it IS the most advanced, complete and evolved operating system around these days. And Windows7 is very speedy indeed on my 2006 pc. I even use IE9 and I think its alright.

[Roj]

Originally Posted by rvo_nl

Reading some comments here I cant help but think you are all still using a very old version of Windows. Some of you are even comparing it to AmigaOS, which is plain ridiculous. For example; okay, so Windows lacks a way to save multiple sets of preferences for videoplayers, in the way the Amiga does when saving screenmode prefs, for example. But do you all realise its not even possible to play back any modern video on an Amiga, even without subtitles? Windows may not be perfect, and for sure is not much 'fun' to use (like AmigaOS) but it IS the most advanced, complete and evolved operating system around these days. And Windows7 is very speedy indeed on my 2006 pc. I even use IE9 and I think its alright.

TL;DR: It's fast. That should be good enough.

This standpoint was first taken in 1987, and I continue to respectfully disagree. Speed is nice, but by itself it can't make up for some of the missing features pointed out earlier.

I'm posting this on a Win7 i7 GTX580 system. The speed makes me happy when I'm running games and applications, but when I return to Windows to get work done, speed simply isn't enough.

[rvo_nl]

Well, perhaps you should go back and read my entire post. I wasnt commenting on the speed.

[Roj]

Originally Posted by rvo_nl

Well, perhaps you should go back and read my entire post. I wasnt commenting on the speed.

I hate picking posts apart, but here goes...

Originally Posted by rvo_nl

Reading some comments here I cant help but think you are all still using a very old version of Windows. Some of you are even comparing it to AmigaOS, which is plain ridiculous.

We're not comparing the two. We're simply saying Windows still lacks specific features. My mini-van has several features that my Camaro lacks. Am I comparing the two? No. I'm saying my Camaro would be improved with these features. Please don't take our discussion to extremes and then use that to try to make us look foolish. It's bad form.

Originally Posted by rvo_nl

For example; okay, so Windows lacks a way to save multiple sets of preferences for videoplayers, in the way the Amiga does when saving screenmode prefs, for example. But do you all realise its not even possible to play back any modern video on an Amiga, even without subtitles?

This is more a speed issue than a shortcoming of the OS. Since the Amiga hardware was incapable of playing back video, few developers saw a point in implementing playback with subtitles.

Originally Posted by rvo_nl

Windows may not be perfect, and for sure is not much 'fun' to use (like AmigaOS)

That's part of what we're talking about here, and we're discussing some of the reasons why.

Originally Posted by rvo_nl

but it IS the most advanced, complete and evolved operating system around these days.

...and on this point we disagree.

Originally Posted by rvo_nl

And Windows7 is very speedy indeed on my 2006 pc. I even use IE9 and I think its alright.

Originally Posted by rvo_nl

Well, perhaps you should go back and read my entire post. I wasnt commenting on the speed.

Speedy. Yes. It's a comment you've made on speed.

I'm not interested in IE9, so I'll let others discuss that in another thread.

[gazgod]

NOBODY CARES!!!

With all this mutual backslapping of feature x or y is missing from windows, you guys seem to be missing the truth of the matter which is nobody gives a flying feck.
Which OS your running doesn't matter to joe public its the application that run upon it that people care about, if they have a web browser that allows them to go on myface, an office package that works etc, they are happy. Hell most people seem to get most of there personal computer needs from phones which have minimal OS functionality.

[Bamiga2002]

People in general don't appreciate computing as they used to.

[rvo_nl]

@roj, First off, I find it ironic that you accuse me of bad form. You replied to a comment I made with a 'TL;DR', then only commented on the very last and least important line of my post. Thats just plain rude.

Anyway, thanks for your lengthy explanation of the purpose of this thread. I wasnt intending to make anyone look foolish. Just wanted to point out that comparing Windows to AmigaOS makes no sense. And Im glad you agree with me there.

Last, I dont expect many people on an Amiga forum to agree with me when I write positive things about Windows or IE9. Its just that some people seem to have a very biased, even short-sighted opinion on anything Microsoft-related. Thats why I made my post.