What's funny is that further down the page they present Push Button Reset, for when your Windows installation deteriorates to the point of being unusably slow. Instead of fixing their OS they decide to burden the user with re-installing the system and then all of their apps. I would face-palm if I weren't laughing so hard.
I wonder if they did any market research on that feature. Every time I tell someone non-techincal that they should re-install Windows to fix their problems the answer is almost invariably either "You can do that?" or "No, that sounds hard."
I guess it makes the local/family geek's job easier when we have to help someone out though. If it's 100% reliable.
In any case piling more hacks and bloat on top of the OS is not the way to mimic Apple. To be fair they would probably need a much bigger reset than the one in 2006 to fix such deep problems.
OK, let's be fair here for a second. If you read Apple's support docs you will quite often run into documents that advocate backing your files to time machine and doing a complete reinstall of OSX.
I don't even need to search too hard. A few weeks ago I wanted to install bootcamp but found out that the bootcamp helper refused to partition my drive because it couldn't find a contiguous 30gb slot on my 80gb free drive. Oh! I could just defrag, I thought to myself... but not so fast, Yuri, Apple does not support defragging because Apple knows best. What do they recommend?
"Another option is to back up your important files, erase the hard disk, then reinstall Mac OS X and your backed up files." (source: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1375)
Anyway, personally, I think the push button reset is a natural progression from the System Restore Points, which are great.
>not so fast, Yuri, Apple does not support defragging because Apple knows best.
Well, they designed and implemented the system, so they should know best.
And they do support defragmentation. Read that page again: "In this case, you might benefit from defragmentation, which can be performed with some third-party disk utilities".
The reality is that few users ever have to worry about fragmentation of their HFS+ drives. And if you are concerned about fragmentation, I suggest 'hfsdebug', a free command-line tool.
I try to be fair, I really do. Of course I'm biased - I grew up using Windows and can't help being bitter about it - but I try to keep things in perspective. Push Button Reset is great for geeks using Windows, but it's a bandage not the cure.
My experience is that Windows' performance deteriorates over time just by using the OS normally. Installing programs and using them, etc. That's one of the things that drove me away from Windows several years ago. Vista and 7 may have changed this but Push Button Reset indicates to me that's not the case. While I agree that the solution to the Bootcamp problem is lame, the situation is quite different. Apple is not recommending you reinstall just to be able to use OS X normally.
Maybe it's not that different, maybe my bias is too strong for me to see it clearly, but I don't think it is.
I use an iMac at work. I like it. (I prefer the way my mouse feels in Windows but aside from that, I enjoy the iMac a great deal).
Still, I think Win7 is the best consumer OS i've ever used.
And specifically to the point you're making -- I got used, with the iMac, to keeping the box up for ages, 30, 60, 90 days at a time. Just by habit I've done the same with my Win7 box at home. Wasn't even stunning to me until I realized one day "Oy! I've got a Win box that's been up for 40 days and feel as snappy as day 4."
I tell you what, you can hold on to your bias or not, your choice, but this is a great OS and a great starting point for them in Redmond for Win8.
Fair enough, I'm glad to see them improve. I don't hate MS or anything of the sort I've just traditionally had bad experiences with their products. I used Vista SP1 for 8-9 months in 2008. It never crashed (when I wasn't OCing) and was great for surfing the web, listening to music, and gaming. I still programmed in a Linux VM though. Cygwin and coLinux don't quite cut it.
It's way too late for me now. I prefer Unix and there's no going back to Windows. I'm a command line junkie. :)
Hmm. I agree with what you say here, but for the opposite reasons.
That is:
I think any OS will deteriorate over time with use. The question is how the OS deals with this fact. The Windows method of memory management and defragging is... passable, but not nearly flexible or versatile for modern machines. For one thing, it's horrendous at dealing with boot configurations. And that reminds the user that Windows (up to 7!) doesn't appear to have any sort of actual boot configurator that even a hard-core geek could use.
What's more, while I see where you're going, and I agree with the thrust, I actually disagree with you that "Push Button Reset is great for geeks." It's the opposite of great for us; what we'd like to do is be able to manage clean reinstalls, and most of all to be able to partition hard disks to our liking. Considering that Windows 7 offers less partitioning options and capabilities than Windows 95 did (seriously, think about that for a moment) and that Vista was the first in a decade even to allow partitioning, we're far from a Windows which affords actual control over the machine or the media that goes into it.
That's really the thing here to me, as a geek. What does Windows 8 have to offer me to impress me and make me happy as a user? The ability to partition seamlessly; the ability to force a partitioning over errors if I want to; the ability to reinstall seamlessly as many times as I need to, to burn reinstallation software as many times as I need to; the ability to easily and directly configure boot parameters, and to make a boot sturdy and permanent for all users on a machine running multiple partitions with differing encryption levels; finally, direct manipulation of inodes/indexes. These are all things which are still, so far as I can tell, flatly impossible within the context of Windows; and where any of them is possible, it's only with the help of expensive software. Whereas a person with a free, burned copy of Knoppix on a disk can do all of them in five minutes with any computer she choose.
I'm not even saying Windows is evil here, or anything like it. It's just that it doesn't in any way meet what I need out of an operating system; there is no control over even the slightest thing, like indexing or bad-sector flags or defragging or partitioning or anything. And I sometimes wonder how Windows developers convince themselves that they're producing a powerful system.
Maybe some of them can answer this; I know they're reasonably intelligent. Do any of you know why Windows won't offer these things? And what we're supposed to do in a world where more and more operating systems do?
> That's really the thing here to me, as a geek. What does Windows 8 have to offer me to impress me and make me happy as a user? The ability to partition seamlessly; the ability to force a partitioning over errors if I want to; the ability to reinstall seamlessly as many times as I need to, to burn reinstallation software as many times as I need to; the ability to easily and directly configure boot parameters, and to make a boot sturdy and permanent for all users on a machine running multiple partitions with differing encryption levels; finally, direct manipulation of inodes/indexes. These are all things which are still, so far as I can tell, flatly impossible within the context of Windows; and where any of them is possible, it's only with the help of expensive software. Whereas a person with a free, burned copy of Knoppix on a disk can do all of them in five minutes with any computer she choose.
Then use Knoppix. Seriously. You just described yourself in the top 1% of computer geeks, and geeks are not part of Microsoft's core market anyway. You want to directly manipulate indexes and inodes?!?! Come on; Microsoft has no time for you, nor should it.
Of course things like different encryptions for different users of the same machine might make sense (although probably not, since that is pretty enterprisy, so probably happens on a server), but low-level disk partitioning is not the right way for Microsoft to handle them, even if they chose to handle them at all.
> Maybe some of them can answer this; I know they're reasonably intelligent. Do any of you know why Windows won't offer these things? And what we're supposed to do in a world where more and more operating systems do?
1) They don't want your business. 2) You're supposed not to use Windows.
Because that's how hard drives work. You move and copy - often very large files nowadays - and fragments of data are left behind, muddying up the system. The question is how the system deals with it.
I actually believe that Windows 7 represents a real improvement on how memory and fragmentation are managed. Vista wasn't bad, either. They both do pretty well.
I think it's more that the registry and filesystem get bloated and crufty. You can defrag an older installation and it'll still be slow.
It happens on new systems too. I've done it dozens of times, install Windows and be happy about the fresh, fast installation. Install some apps so you can use the machine and it slows down. Office was always the worst, even on a brand new install.
I can. I've borked several Linux partitions by installing incompatible versions of libraries, etc. Any highly-configurable system carries the risk of falling into an unusable (for you) configuration.
Partitioning an already heavily used disk for bootcamp is probably the closest any relatively normal user would ever get to needing to degrag an OS X volume.
And pretty much the only time a normal user would ever need to reinstall OS X is if something went seriously wrong with the system files. It's a very abnormal thing to encounter. And even if you somehow need to do so, the option to preserve user information has been in OS X for a long time.
Not to get all tangental, but these are reasons why something like iOS is the probable future of consumer computing. There is so much crap that people deal with on a day to day basis with computers that they should never even have to know about.
It looks like this slide isn't intended for internal Microsoft use, so likely they are trying to get across the intentions/direction of focus to the audience.
More specifically, I think they are trying to convince Dell/HP that they can build an Apple-like brand without leaving the Windows ecosystem (e.g. in favor of buying/building their own OS, e.g. via Palm). That's what the hardware-manufacturer-branded app stores are also about.
FTA: "Of note, these slides were apparently leaked or inadvertently released after being given to one Derek Goode at HP. Likewise, many of the discussions throughout the slides address HP."
