是在Windows 7值得拯救XP呢?

21个万多的Windows用户上书微软保存Windows XP中。有一个值得的继任者终于到来?

是否视窗7辜负期望将保持在几个月激烈的辩论来。早期的容貌展现出希望,但是当涉及到工程质量的失望,很少有人能这样做是为了在某种程度上,微软可以和在迭代过去。记住怎样discouraging Windows Vista was? After five years of revolutionary promises, Microsoft dumped the honking mess on the world in fall 2007, complete with convoluted user interfaces, annoying security nags, and steep hardware requirements that forced needless PC upgrades -- all wrapped up in a variety of flavors whose differences seemed unnecessarily confusing.

当时,我们在InfoWorld的不断从IT听到安静的怨言关于新视窗, but the prevailing attitude about Vista trended toward resignation. In a nutshell, we kept hearing users say, "After all, Microsoft controls Windows and we have no choice but to accept what it delivers." Worse, most of the major analyst firms fawned over the fledgling Vista, leaving many to second-guess their doubts.

[ Relive the furor over Windows Vista and the passion behind the"Save XP" campaign。|获取有关新的Windows 7的全部铲与InfoWorld的“视窗7: The essential guide" compendium and the 21-page "Windows 7的深潜" PDF report. ]

Microsoft, of course, denied loudly that there was anything wrong, with its execs and PR minions claiming repeatedly that Vista was the result of world-beating engineering and extensive customer research, with that special soul-hocking that usually only (ironically, Mac-using) ad agencies can do with a straight face. (To add insult to injury, Microsoft is about to launch an ad campaign claiming that Windows 7 is not only based on listening to its customers -- that's why Microsoft made the "we fixed Vista" changes -- but also that Windows 7 was设计by its customers, which I suppose is where the new taskbar and Aero Peek functions came from, not theMac OS XDock and Exposé app they suspiciously mimic. Hey, Microsoftfooled the New York Timesabout this, so maybe it thinks it can fool you, too.)

Out of that "we really don't like Vista but feel hopeless about it" atmosphere grew InfoWorld's"Save XP" campaign, aimed at calling out the miasma that was Vista and rallying both IT and end-users to stand up to Microsoft and demand that Windows XP be kept available until Microsoft could deliver a worthwhile replacement. More than 210,000 of you signed our "Save XP" petition demanding that XP remain on the market. Those same analyst firms that touted Vista in late 2007 suddenly began criticizing it by spring 2008, when the "Save XP" campaign got wide media coverage. While Microsoft made little public mention of your voices, andCEO史蒂夫·鲍尔默忽略了你的请愿书when we delivered it, it came up with a convolution called the "XP downgrade" that has in fact maintained XP's availability on the market in parallel with Vista.

So you won.

But the question remains: Now that Windows 7 is officially shipping, was it worth saving Windows XP for?

My answer: Yes -- but. Yes, Windows 7 is not the disaster that Vista was. But Windows 7 is no home run, either. I can't imagine people camping out for it or even getting excited in large numbers, as they would for a newiPhoneor Mac OS X. It will also be interesting to see how many will"downgrade" Windows 7 to XP, an option made available for some editions of Windows 7 until April 23, 2011, for those not yet ready to make the Windows 7 leap. (A Hewlett-Packard exec told me he expects many if not most businesses to "downgrade" Windows 7 to XP through much of 2010. And he expects almost no one to buy Vista after today.)

The bottom line is that Windows 7 is better than Vista, and in many ways, it's technically better than Windows XP. Still, I'm not sure it's a necessary OS, and there are several reasons I won't make it my main OS. But if my company migrated from XP to Windows 7, I would not object, as I would have vehemently opposed any migration from XP to Vista. If my company had forced me to adopt Vista, I would be screaming for a Windows 7 upgrade to ease the pain.

Where Windows 7 delivers the goods视窗7 corrects Vista's most egregious problem: a convoluted user interface that left many users in tears trying to do what had been simple work in XP. In Vista, you could have a half-dozen dialog boxes littering your screen just using the Personalize control panel, for example.

视窗7 tones down the number of "are you sure?" security alerts from the User Access Control function -- and even lets you control the nag level. However, some experts view this nag-reduction functionality as a sure path tocompromised security

视窗7 sets in placea multicore foundationthat should matter increasingly as multicore PCs become the norm and applications are written accordingly. You won't likely experience that benefit for some years, but XP could never get you there.

[ 学习how to deploy Windows 7in your organization with advice from InfoWorld's J. Peter Bruzzese. | Follow the重要的Windows 7的发展through InfoWorld's ongoing coverage. ]

The new Windows 7 task bar -- even if it is"inspired" by Mac OS X's Dock——和同伴Aero的峰值特性(可用only if you have the right graphics hardware and driver) -- inspired by Mac OS X's Exposé feature -- go a long way toward making it easy to run and navigate among multiple applications, essential for day-to-day operations.还有其他UI改进是 - 一旦你使用的应用程序进行升级,以支持他们 - 也引人注目,如跳转列表(类固醇的上下文菜单)和任务栏动画。

For IT, Windows 7's support (in some versions) for a single image in multilingual environments, as well as management capabilities such as better encryption setup and management through BitLocker and AppLocker, is welcome. Note that many of Windows 7's management and networking improvements, such as BranchCache and DirectAccess, require that you also upgrade your back-end Microsoft infrastructure, such as by using Windows Server 2008 R2.

最后,应用程序不兼容deviled Vista users seem to be largely handled by Windows 7.

Where Windows 7 falls flat但Windows 7有一些真正的缺点是脾气任何激情我可能会觉得它。最大的唐纳是新的UI。是的,Aero的“玻璃”的东西很酷,假设你有兼容的视频硬件和驱动程序,但眼睛糖果消退相当快。我只是不能接受的是用户界面,其中的Windows从你和猜测隐藏了大部分的功能,以你想要的东西的上下文方式。这让我工作太辛苦,因为Windows很少知道我要找的。

更糟的是,我失去了工作,在那里我可以我的鼠标移动到右侧菜单,几乎选择所需的选项不看的“运动记忆”的方法。这是一个真正的节省时间在XP和其他基于菜单的操作系统。搞清楚这些图标的含义,它在哪里,以及如何找到它,如果Windows没有觉得我需要它真的很慢我失望(如没有搞清楚如何打开菜单回到那里他们仍然支持)。

[ Mac attack:视窗7 versus Snow Leopard。|What Windows 7 has stolen from the Mac OS, andwhat Apple has stolen from Windows。]

Microsoft is determined to ram that contextual UI approach down all our throats. It's not only standard in Windows but in Office and bundled Windows apps like Media Player; if you plan to remain with Windows, you'll simply have to get used to it. I can't, so I'm sticking with Mac OS X as my primary OS, and I stillrecommend desktop Linux's simpler interfacethat most business users can more easily adapt to if they must leave XP behind on their PCs.

我不得不承认,一些人们喜欢新的基于功能区的背景UI; for them, Windows 7's refined version is a real plus.

一旦你过去的UI - 眼睛糖果和上下文的方法都 - 的Windows 7并没有带来很多的表,这将使我想在这方面投资。它的touch capabilities are a disappointment"XP mode" approach确保向后兼容性是笨重的 - 你基本上运行在隔离XP,限制诸如复制和粘贴操作。

And there's the ongoing issue of too many versions with hard-to-understand differences that will bedvil home users, small businesses, and even enterprise IT (which will know to pick just one but still face the reality that employees working at home on their own PCs could have any of several versions. That needless variety is compounded by the fact that some OS features, such as Aero Peek, work only if you have specific graphics hardware and drivers installed -- so companies will likely find that even with a standard version of Windows 7, their users will have different capabilities. That should be fun for tech support ("Is your graphics processor DirectX 9-compatible? Do you have a WDDM driver installed?" "Huh?").

Some of Windows 7's innovations are rip-offs of the Mac OS, which I already use. If you're not on a Mac, they'll hold more appeal for you. Two examples are "library" views (the equivalent of the Mac's "smart folders") and home groups -- though I find this allegedly friendly file-sharing technology harder to set up than the Mac's sharing.

"Save XP": A victory where the champagne is flatAt the end of the day, Windows 7 is the OS Microsoft should have shipped instead of Vista, and we should all be excited today by a Windows 7 that is really compelling and innovative. But what we have is Vista R2.

Saving XP was the right thing to do, but I do wish that Microsoft had done a lot more than clean up Vista in the meantime. Windows 7 is a relief, but nothing to celebrate. I wanted champagne, but I got Alka-Seltzer.

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这个故事,“是在Windows 7值得拯救XP呢?”was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Follow the latest developments in Windows 7, Windows in general, and Mac OS X at InfoWorld.com.

这个故事,“是在Windows 7值得拯救XP呢?”最初由出版InfoWorld

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