How do I love Windows 7? Let me count the ways!

[Steve A.]

If and when I ever thing of something I will post it here. But please post the things that you do like about Windows 7.

Steve Ahola

P.S. I only have the Home Premium version of Windows 7- I think that there could be things I liked in the more expensive versions.

[jbltwin1]

Actually, I do like win7 for some things. I like the fact that I can use it for FTP transfers without using and outside program. It REALLY makes managing websites easier when you write bare html. I also liked win xp pro. Hey, I can't help it! Now if you wanted to hack about win8, THAT sucks!

[km6xz]

I find that Win7 is stable and almost immune to the Blue Screen of Death, it is pretty secure, finally, and is not interfering with my work.
In my office, everyone used Ubuntu and the office file and print server is Ubuntu Server, 28 desktops and 1 server with the only downtime in 4 years has been when a power supply fails on one of the desktops. $25 and 15 minutes later, all is well again.

So we are in a pretty good era where the OS does not interfere with our work. My deskstops at home are Mint 15 now and during the break at the end of tourist season later this month all the office computers are getting Mint 15. I have been testing it on two boxes at home and it is slick, pretty and polished and natively supports just about any hardware I have thrown at it. My main computer, my laptop needs Windows due to my development frameworks and applications do not run well with VMware due to lack of resources. It is dual boot but stays in Win7 90% of the time. I use Adobe Creativity Suite(mainly Photoshop CS6, LightRoom, Dreamweaver, Premiere Pro, AfterEffects, InDesign and Fireworks) every day and my PHP development RAD. So there is still a good reason to have Win7. As it turns out, I do more forum posts on my Galaxy SIII phone than my laptop.
For general web, email, office productivity and media watching most people would find their needs fully satisfied by Linux now. For years there was a constant debate as to whether Linux was ready for the desktop and when it finally is, the desktop is dying. Android runs atop a Linux kernel so Linux has overtaken MS in total usage of operating systems. The future of Microsoft is not clear at all, with the rapid growth of Software as Service, even its main money maker, Office, is threatened. Everything I ever needed Word or Excel to do, Libreoffice does just fine. I have Office but since the rest of the office uses Libreoffice and the ODF file format, I use it also. The most welcome feature is being able to save directly into a PDF instead of having to use expensive and heavy Acrobat.

[big_teee]

I find I like it much better, since I quit using it!
Almost a year now, Windoz Free!
T

[überfuzz]

OFF TOPIC
km6xz - What do you do while using Mint? Why do you plan to switch to it? I'm mainly programming in C/C++ so I guess I'll be fine in any distribution. As of lately I'm getting more and more prone to ditch openSUSE, and mint seems to be a nice distribution.

[km6xz]

I do not have a problem with any of the distros but I made a few flash drive bootable with Mint 15 and the newest Ubuntu and let the girls in the office play with them and they all preferred the desktop and UI of Mint. I like both Ubuntu and Mint, but most of the time I am on my Win 7 laptop and I did not want to demand everyone use what I was not. I wanted to change to all the same version of whatever they decided since they now have several different versions of Ubuntu, with very different user interfaces. Now, it is harder to cover each other's desk when one is on vacation or out of the office so I wanted to start fresh with everyone on the same page.
Mint was tried several years ago and we ran into problems but it has come a long ways. This latest version worked flawlessly on every machine, with a wide variety of wireless and wired network connections, printers, both network and local, found and loaded better scanner and camera drivers.....nothing I tired failed to work during installation so that gives me more free time to do my normal tasks which is everything others either do not know how to do or resist doing it.
I am the only one in the office who knows the detailed of every task or function (except some of our accountant's activities....still have not gotten my head around the unusual Russian accounting systems so we run two complete accounting frameworks, a western international and the Russian system).
I wrote all the applications that automate much of the office tasks, wrote the web shopping cart and remote applications the guides and port personnel use, handle promotion, marketing, policies, write the tour books, publish a quarterly tabloid size 16 page newspaper, deal with immigration and museum contracts etc, etc. Luckily everything runs pretty smoothly so I primarily just take care of problems and spend less and less time at the office since the staff is bright, trustworthy and eager to work, 28 full timers and many seasonal during tour season, 150 this year, all working outside the office. So having a big headache of keeping every computer running, the server running and out cloud running off our dedicated server in NJ all running well and without much attention now that we switched to Linux lets me spend more productive time doing other things to stay ahead of the competition. All the full time employees get 2-3 months paid vacation in the fall and winter plus all the other holidays so right after the season ends is a good time to do that sort of thing...right now, since hardly anyone is there this week. They get great benefits that keeps them loyal, resulting in almost no turnover. That helps make things run better also, everyone has already made their rookie mistakes long ago.
I am trying to fade out of operations and spend more time with my other projects. I started another more personal tour company last year, have the pro audio repair shop and planning a restaurant/night club. So any help from having no problems with Windows is welcome.

[big_teee]

I do not have a problem with any of the distros but I made a few flash drive bootable with Mint 15 and the newest Ubuntu and let the girls in the office play with them and they all preferred the desktop and UI of Mint. I like both Ubuntu and Mint, but most of the time I am on my Win 7 laptop and I did not want to demand everyone use what I was not. I wanted to change to all the same version of whatever they decided since they now have several different versions of Ubuntu, with very different user interfaces. Now, it is harder to cover each other's desk when one is on vacation or out of the office so I wanted to start fresh with everyone on the same page.
Mint was tried several years ago and we ran into problems but it has come a long ways. This latest version worked flawlessly on every machine, with a wide variety of wireless and wired network connections, printers, both network and local, found and loaded better scanner and camera drivers.....nothing I tired failed to work during installation so that gives me more free time to do my normal tasks which is everything others either do not know how to do or resist doing it.
I am the only one in the office who knows the detailed of every task or function (except some of our accountant's activities....still have not gotten my head around the unusual Russian accounting systems so we run two complete accounting frameworks, a western international and the Russian system).
I wrote all the applications that automate much of the office tasks, wrote the web shopping cart and remote applications the guides and port personnel use, handle promotion, marketing, policies, write the tour books, publish a quarterly tabloid size 16 page newspaper, deal with immigration and museum contracts etc, etc. Luckily everything runs pretty smoothly so I primarily just take care of problems and spend less and less time at the office since the staff is bright, trustworthy and eager to work, 28 full timers and many seasonal during tour season, 150 this year, all working outside the office. So having a big headache of keeping every computer running, the server running and out cloud running off our dedicated server in NJ all running well and without much attention now that we switched to Linux lets me spend more productive time doing other things to stay ahead of the competition. All the full time employees get 2-3 months paid vacation in the fall and winter plus all the other holidays so right after the season ends is a good time to do that sort of thing...right now, since hardly anyone is there this week. They get great benefits that keeps them loyal, resulting in almost no turnover. That helps make things run better also, everyone has already made their rookie mistakes long ago.
I am trying to fade out of operations and spend more time with my other projects. I started another more personal tour company last year, have the pro audio repair shop and planning a restaurant/night club. So any help from having no problems with Windows is welcome.

I Prefer the Mint also, with mate desktop.
To make it boot and run faster, in startup applications, uncheck the mint update.
Then daily just run the updates manually with three commands.
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade
sudo apt-get autoclean
Do those one at a time, waiting for each to complete before doing the other.
That keeps mint from searching for updates all the time, and tying up resources.
T

[km6xz]

I went into the office today and took a few computers apart for cleaning...boy they accumulate a lot of dust.... and check cables and general QC, replaced some keyboards and then loading in Mint 15. While one was loading in, I cleaned another and got 11 of them done today. I will do the rest next week. That should be the the extent of my involvement in computers for the year. When everyone comes back from vacations I expect a few people to complain that they desktop is different but other than that I also expect it will be a smooth transistion.
I still have to keep the accountant's computer Windows because my commercial bank's direct tax and account programs will only run Windows with a very picky dongle that will not work with VMWare. It also requires a very specific version of Internet Explorer to log into the web access. The actual accounting software logs into the bank network, not a TCP/IP network.

So tired but happy to have a bit more than 1/3 done. Was out all night so was going without sleep but still did not seem to make any major mistakes. A fun night last night, my friend I was to meet brought her girlfriend who turned out to be even more of a babe than my friend...two very attractive, very cool, very smart, young ladies to entertain....fun.

[salvarsan]

My laptop runs win7 and it stays out of the way for the most part. The wireless networking support is relatively painless compared to the chore that Fedora Linux obligates you to. Excel is the primary motivation for using Windows.

All other work (i.e., CAD, computational chemistry, rendering, programming, etc.) happens on the Fedora box.

[big_teee]

My laptop runs win7 and it stays out of the way for the most part. The wireless networking support is relatively painless compared to the chore that Fedora Linux obligates you to. Excel is the primary motivation for using Windows.

All other work (i.e., CAD, computational chemistry, rendering, programming, etc.) happens on the Fedora box.

I was a avid user of Excel, I used it for years in my work job before retirement.
I find LibreOffice Calc spreadsheet program, to be very easy to use, especially with the additional extensions available.
I have the Wrap Insert Toolbar extension loaded.
It allows me to insert Copied Rows.
I used the insert copied row option a lot in excel, always missed it with linux, and now it is available & doable with the extension.
T

[Steve A.]

Well, I must admit that Windows 7 has some powerful features not available with XP. On T-day morning I got a nasty looking dialog box that warned me that my boot disc was going to fail soon and that I needed to back it up immediately. Wow- I have had several drives fail under XP and never got a warning like that. I am impressed.

Being Turkey Day Fry's was closed so I figured that I would switch back to my 64-bit XP Gateway. I tried to get it to recognize my USB 3.0 ext HD and PCIE card and I never could get it to fly. Windows 7 is great at pulling needed drivers out from thin air- or should I say ether?

I am posting this from my Android tablet as I am copying my drives. Damn, you Western Digital! I just bought a 2TB "Desktop" drive and when I opened it I saw that it was the damned WD Green drive (this is the one that powers down every 2 or 3 seconds to save energy. Fortunately there is a WD utility called "wdidle" which allows me to turn off that "feature.") In any case I am copying data files from my 2TB Caviar Black to the damned WD Greenie so I can use the Caviar Black drive as my boot disc.

Steve Ahols