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The good, the bad, and the windows 7

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MrAl

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Hello there,

As the title implies, Windows 7 seems ugly compared to Windows XP. When i look at the List View controls, i see there are no lines anymore. I also see a throwback to Windows 98 (Yikes) where the color settings are very very limited. In XP there were more options to alter the colors, and the fonts showed up better in Windows Explorer (the file manager). That's pretty nutty. Also a throwback to Windows 95 (double yikes) is the Message Box is now limited to 85 characters across when in XP it is something like 131 characters. That means if you programmed an application to show a regular path or something in XP it will show up in multiple lines in Win 7, very very strange. That also means if you've done any text formatting in the message box in XP it will break at seemingly random places in the lines because it will think it should, and there is no way to stop that from happening.

The solution which is not a solution at all as suggested by a Windows representative is to simply make your own Message Box, where you can make the line length any length you care to. You can make it 85 chars, 95 chars, 105 chars, or 1005 chars (if it fits on the screen) and all is well.
But as usually, their suggestions are simple minded and not well thought out. Of course we can make our own message boxes, with any line length we want. But we also expect to get reasonably constant results from the Windows API without this kind of change up, but that's not the worst case.
What is the worst is that while we can program our own message box with fancy lines and graphics and make it real nice looking, what about in program code that has already gone out the door long ago? What about the 100 applications that people are using out there that have already been written? Do we have to do a "total recall" just so we can reformat the text in the message boxes for all those applications?
At the very least they should have supplied an alternate message box where we can alter the width of the text box. That would have solved the program forever if it was done long ago. But since it wasnt the least they could have done was leave the darn thing alone. Instead it is hard coded into the op sys.

Also, the Aero desktop graphics are pretty nice, but they dont give you many options there either. Either you turn it on or your turn it off, and when you turn it on you get a "cloud" that appears behind all the Title Bar window text that obscures the text to some degree so it is actually much harder to read. Everything else about Aero seems ok, but that is definitely nasty and if there was a way to turn just that 'feature' off then it would be much nicer.
 
Welcome to the club. I converted in mid-August. I have yet to get used to the libraries vs. folders. Try to find Windows Explorer. I do not like the filing structure, but that is something we have to live with.

One nice thing is the snipping tool. Win7 also boots very quickly, but my update also included a SSD, so that is probably part of it. I also turned off automatic updates and do updates at my convenience. Otherwise, I found turning off took forever sometimes.

Windows Live Mail is buggy compared to Outlook Express. Outlook is still supported on Win7, so I may install my 2007 version. I had an early crash that required re-installation of Win7 because of WLM.
 
Hi there John,

Thanks for sharing your view on this too.

Yes, i agree that some things in the basic ground structure of the op sys work better. But some of the graphics is just terrible. I could easily read file info in Windows Explorer under XP, but under Win 7 it is hard to see the info because it is painted in a text color that is the same as a grayed out menu item. That's nuts too.

One thing that works better is the AHCI support which is most important for the SSD drives. Without that they wont trim. In XP i tried all sorts of stuff but nothing improved the disk performance. I was getting something like 20MB/sec max speed on the 4k file tests even after every possible trick in the book. In Win 7 i get 150MB/sec max speed on the 4k file tests and that is important to what i do with my computer.

So if they would just improve the graphics to give the user more choices over the appearance that would be much better. The thing that bothers me most is that they went through this very problem years ago, and fixed it. They provided a lot more settings in Win XP. But now it's like we're back to square 1. It's like they are playing games with it or something.

When something like this affects so many computer users i think there should be something legally that can be done about it. Force them to fix it or give us the code so we can fix it ourselves, or at least a tweek program to adjust settings for Windows Explorer.

I am currently writing my own file manager, but it takes time to get all the functionality in there.
 
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