Seven Windows 7 Questions (and Answers)

"Mike Ybarra: It's a beta fish."

No, it's Betta fish. The two words have neither the same meaning, origin, spelling, or pronunciation.

I hope they're not finalized on stability. I tried it on my laptop and it was BS after BS about every 20-30 minutes for the 6 hours I could stand to try it. It was fast and much lower resource hungry than Vista. As for that "gem under the rock", I hope it isn't some broken feature that can't be turned off and is always in your face trying to do function X, Y, or Z for you, never getting it right, and actually decreasing productivity instead.

Have you ever heard of a pun? Play on words? This is the beta release, that is a Betta fish, they sound the same and most people, not you apparently, will chuckle for a few seconds, roll their eyes, and say, "Wow..."

They do not sound the same unless you are pronouncing one incorrectly. If it were a pun, the word beta should have been followed by [sic] to denote that it was misspelled intentionally.

I'm with ace on this one. It's pretty obvious it was a pun, and you should really learn to take a joke. At the end of the day it's a silly thing no one cares about - no need to freak about it.

That said, I'm highly impressed with the beta and can't wait to use the real thing. The only thing I don't like is the vista style Start>All Programs menu... I want my easy to read, expanding XP menu back.

...four posts (now five) about a fish, nice...

Beta Fish...OK sixth post about fish.

I'm quite impressed that the Beta releases has been pretty stable compared to the previous windows versions in their respective Beta stage. But from what I see...there's still sao much to be done, correct, etc.

"If we take away public folders, certain things would just break."

And going from "documents and settings" to "Users," "Program Files" to "Program Files" and "Program Data" and junction points work well?

So the Windows developer personally likes to type in the Search bar and the rest of the world is stuck with it?

I had a nasty issue with installing cisco VPN client v5.
Installation ran smoothly but after the required restart win7 would not load. I would see the loading screen then my computer would restart(kinda like a bad overclock. Win7 then attempted to repair itself and succeeded. I tried the install once more and again the same problem only this time I couldn't get the installation to repair so I had to reformat and reinstall win7.

Which brings me to the beta installation which is kind of a nuisance. You can't boot from the disc, format and install for some reason. I had to format the drive and begin the installation while using my XP install. Then wait for the system to restart it self without warning and it will continue the installation on the drive.

I haven't had a chance to really take it for a test drive, maybe this weekend.

I love the fact that you can rearrange the order of running programs in the taskbar. It is very useful for a working environment where you get so used to having your taskbar items in a certain order. When you want to switch programs your muscle memory takes you to a certain position in the taskbar.

Hey Betta's are awesome fish. My wife got a kick out of the background screen.

I think I'm starting to see the stuck-upness of the microsoft philosophy crack. They have been getting propositions form developers and lots of feedback because people are seeing that they are trying to make the product work for the customers not the other way around - e.g. "No, Vista isn't crap, you're crap because you don't understand it.". It's like an apology from Microsoft - I think i might sleep better tonight =)

Why windows 7 dosen't work with Punkbuster software???

I wish Creative Labs would "fix" their gameport driver to work in Vista/Windows 7! Has there been any news on this? SIGH!

I hope Microsoft doesn't forget to add better hardware, software, and driver support like XP has to there win7 OS.
I have 6 computers, and I can only get Vista Ultimate Corp edition to run on only one of them which is an old Pentium 4 system.

I installed this on my Biostar X58 motherboard and I had some driver problems. I pulled it off. I'm surprised they didn't make sure it would work on the latest motherboards, as owners of these boards are more likely to try out betas, and these are the boards of the future. I was happy to see my dell printer would work, though.

I too would like to see the expandable start menus back - I had a bazillion things on my XP machine all organized perfectly in relevant folders. I hate scrolling up and down the Vista start menus looking for my apps.

I've got two 22" monitors side by side and got so sick of having to go all the way to the left to get to my apps, I made my own. I made a folder on my desktop and put all my app catagories in it then copied the shortcuts to the appropriate folders. Then you just add that folder to the task bar and move it right by the clock. Now there is an "Apps>>" chevron that I click and bang, all my apps neatly organized.

I do this on all my machines now, and NEVER use the start menu, plus it's very easily backed up so I can just dump it on a new machine and everything is perfect, no reorganizing of the start menu.

Can't you switch to classic Start menu? You could in Vista!

Add me to the list of those wishing to have the classic expandable menu! I really like the idea of creating the organized folders though. As for finding an option to turn on the classic start menu, I searched high and low in the beta and could not find it anywhere!

Having said that, there was a number of things I wanted to do but could not find where to make the changes. Way too many levels to access the simplest of things. A window with tabs is fast and easy when it comes to finding something.

I just wish Microsoft would give us the choice of working with our computers the way we want to. Sure, give us the nice flashy menus that make the nubies go "Wow!", but give the oldsters the option of doing it the old way. Hey, if it ain't broke, don't fix it. I hope Microsoft learned that lesson with Vista. Probably not, but hope springs eternal