Windows 7 Wish List

[HistoricalNeowin]

1. More 3D Effects like Cube3d.

2. Virtual Desktops.

3. Antivirus as part of Security Center.

4. Can we replace Paint with something better like? Some people are not willing to spend hundreds of $$$ for ittle bit more features then what Paint have.

5. Word replacement...some stripped down version of Word?

6. Too many email clients. Windows Mail, Live Mail?

7. Live software suite should be part of Windows.

8. More themes.

9. Change Windows Classic with true Windows 2000 look and feel which had specific shades of gray color as well as font size.

10. Download manage as IE feature. Internet Download Manager is a good example.

11. Support for PDF.

12. Support for some new video formats like h.264.

13. Media Center needs more options to control size of the screen, and pick different TV formats.

2. Anti-competitive

3. Anti-competitive

4. Already in windows 7

5. Wordpad is improved in windows 7, but stripped down word would compete with Word and would be anti-competitive

7. VERY anti-competitive, they would definitely be sued for that

[jjrambo]

2. Anti-competitive

3. Anti-competitive

4. Already in windows 7

5. Wordpad is improved in windows 7, but stripped down word would compete with Word and would be anti-competitive

7. VERY anti-competitive, they would definitely be sued for that

I don't understand anti-competitive issue. Why the **** anybody care what one company puts in ther operating system. It's their right. Simply put, people use what's best for them. Norton Antivirus sucks and so people don't use it. Netscape didn't fail because MS shipped IE with Windows but because they sucked. If somebody thinks that something in Windows is anti-competitive, well make your version to be ****ing better otherwise shut the **** up. Microsoft doesn't forbid or prevent people from installing anything they want in Windows. If somebody wants to use Mozilla, well you can. If somebody doesn't use Mozilla it doesn't cause that person likes IE more then Mozilla.

For example i don't use WinAmp cause i think it blows. I use Windows Media Player 11. I don't use Media Center cause i think blows so i use VLC Player for DVD playback etc...

How about MS strips down kernel...guess it's anti competitive as well...

The bottom line....it's all bull****

[stiff~meister]

What do you mean? Windows already supports multi-mon. Has since Win98.

Dual monotor support in Vista is Pathetic, especially with Notebooks (at least my notebook)

very much room for improvement.

Oh BTW, UAC must go!

stiff

[jjrambo]

I want to see Windows 7 X64 version only with emulation support for older 32bit apps. It's out of my ****ing mind the idea of making another 32bit version.

You can pick 64bit cpu for $40 nowdays..

[redvamp128]

A true safe mode... that runs independent of Bootloader files (Command.com/NTDETECT) ... Like Windows PE but with the accessibility to run the System Restore. Yes safe mode works well and good if these files are intact. But if they corrupt... then it does not want to boot. And using the install cd won't work.. Example if your XP Cd is at GOLD (no service pack level) and your OS is now at SP2 level and you do the fixmbr or the fixboot. It does not want to work. Unless you ripped your XP cd and sliptreamed the service pack and reburned the CD. Or paid for a new install CD.

[Brandon Live Veteran]

I want to see Windows 7 X64 version only with emulation support for older 32bit apps. It's out of my ****ing mind the idea of making another 32bit version.

You can pick 64bit cpu for $40 nowdays..

Why would you ever want to emulate support for 32-bit apps?

64-bit Windows versions already support 32-bit applications natively...

I run the 32-bit version on my laptop because it only has 2GB of RAM. Running the 64-bit version would be a waste. Very few people have 4GB laptops at this point...

[tnsply100]

I have not scanned the whole thread.. so I may be just repeating other's items..

1.) Proper fix for MAX_PATH please. I haven't tested this with Vista (but have seen some webpages that claim that it is not fixed in Vista), but XP the limitation of 255 characters in full paths is quite an annoyance for developers or administrators working with deep hierarchies. When I posted about this here, I was told one of the Windows teams was trying to do some path shortening to reduce the occurrence of this error.

2.) "File is locked or disk is full" message improved - Would be nice if we were told which process was locking down the file. Actually, I think this process explorer (add on download) already has the ability to say which files a process has locked down - so it should be pretty trivial to do a reverse lookup right?

3.) Meaningful UAC messages - the messages in Vista do not always tell the user which process is asking for admin privileges.

4.) "Advanced mode" installer - Allow us to select which programs we would like during the install. If I don't want games/wordpad/paint/wmplayer, it would be nice if I could stop them from ever getting installed. (might be good if we could also not install components that run defragging/error reporting/ etc)

5.) Please - no surprises like vista wordpad not being able to handle .doc files. What exactly was this all about? I don't quite understand why this was necessary .. I hope it wasn't to just "encourage" more people to buy office.

6.) Misc Issues -

- No Folder view problems - I imagine this really should be fixed in Vista itself.

- And it would be nice if we could just shut off the "content type guessing" or whatever feature sets the folder view types. (I think this requires a registry hack right now). I prefer that my OS not automatically guess folder types based on content.

- An explorer option to have the "Up" (go to parent folder) button back would be nice as well - inspite of the breadcrumb business.

- updates of paint/notepad/etc would be nice. Would there be some legal issues with MS shipping windows with, say, Notepad++ or something?

I would've added system requirements here... but I think Microsoft rep has already confirmed system requirments will remain the same (at least, that's the goal).

Edited June 13, 2008 by tnsply100

[MrKuro]

- mouse gestures

- tabbed explorer

- ui consistancy

- minimalistic design

[EnzoFX]

I for one love UAC and everyone should...

No, not because I love clicking the ok button, but because it's brings everyone attention to a very important issue, applications should not need administrative privileges to run. The annoyance should be corrected once developers rewrite? their apps! It's a bold move, but a necessary one to have UAC behave the way it does. With that said UAC will not go away anytime soon, it's an important security feature and pretty silly to disable, especially as more applications are replaced with proper versions that don't bring up the annoying popup. At most, it will only be tweaked at the user-interaction level.

[Calum Veteran]

Somebody in an earlier post bought up an excellent point!

Vista sometimes doesn't allow me to savea file or move a file if the full filepath is over a certain length! This is ridiculous, because some of us like to keep our documents very organised. E.g. I'm doing a software engineering course at Uni & I like to put all of my programs that are Visual Basic projects in the 'Visual Basic' folder of my whole 'University Documents' folder, but I then had to change the 'Visual Basic' folder to "VB", as Vista doesn't allow me to have a longer filepath. I didn't like this because I don't often use abbrevations. I think this is ridiculous and very un-userfriendly. Also, what makes it more user friendly is that my PC's hard drive can hold a longer file path than my back-up hardrive, even though the back-up one is more GB... :blink: then, to make it worse, when copying a whole load of files & it tells you the filepath is too long, it won't let you change the name of the file there and then! :blink: this is extremely user unfriendly & doesn't need to happen, surely?

Please can somebody tell me why, giving me a excellent & reasonable reason, Vista & other Windows versions have this behaviour? Or, at least, why do they have the filepath limit so small!?

Thanks in advance.

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Now playing on iTunes: U2 - Stuck in a Moment

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[PL_ Veteran]

Compared to a nice DWM enabled theme?

Yuck. You can keep your window tearing and redrawing nastiness.

Thank you, that's exactly what I wanted to do. It's much easier to focus in a virtual machine with a 2000 skin applied IMO.

[KeeperOfThePizza]

Better handling for Dual Display users. (Ultramon like capabilities)

Tabbed Explorer

Aero is crap get rid of it (basic looks like crap squash that too) :p

[medium_pimpin]

WinFS (or ZFS)

Support for VMs in ALL versions

Options for less eye-candy

Better handling of zip/RAR/tar natively

Removal of legacy support for 16-bit apps and drivers (ftw)

[ViperAFK]

WinFS (or ZFS)

Support for VMs in ALL versions

Options for less eye-candy

Better handling of zip/RAR/tar natively

Removal of legacy support for 16-bit apps and drivers (ftw)

WinFS is not a file system so can't really be compared to ZFS at all.

You can already turn off all the eye candy in vista

64 bit already removes support for 16 bit apps.

I do however wish the zip file handling was better.

[jjrambo]

Somebody in an earlier post bought up an excellent point!

Vista sometimes doesn't allow me to savea file or move a file if the full filepath is over a certain length! This is ridiculous, because some of us like to keep our documents very organised. E.g. I'm doing a software engineering course at Uni & I like to put all of my programs that are Visual Basic projects in the 'Visual Basic' folder of my whole 'University Documents' folder, but I then had to change the 'Visual Basic' folder to "VB", as Vista doesn't allow me to have a longer filepath. I didn't like this because I don't often use abbrevations. I think this is ridiculous and very un-userfriendly. Also, what makes it more user friendly is that my PC's hard drive can hold a longer file path than my back-up hardrive, even though the back-up one is more GB... :blink: then, to make it worse, when copying a whole load of files & it tells you the filepath is too long, it won't let you change the name of the file there and then! :blink: this is extremely user unfriendly & doesn't need to happen, surely?

Please can somebody tell me why, giving me a excellent & reasonable reason, Vista & other Windows versions have this behaviour? Or, at least, why do they have the filepath limit so small!?

Thanks in advance.

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Now playing on iTunes: U2 - Stuck in a Moment

via FoxyTunes

I pointed couple times on this forum that Windows File/Folder organization/naming is terrible....it sucks actually. Microsoft didn't do a thing since Windows 3.11

[jjrambo]

Why would you ever want to emulate support for 32-bit apps?

64-bit Windows versions already support 32-bit applications natively...

I run the 32-bit version on my laptop because it only has 2GB of RAM. Running the 64-bit version would be a waste. Very few people have 4GB laptops at this point...

I didn't mean emulate...used the wrong word. I meant nothing different then what x64 Vista does. Why it would be waste. 2Gb will be fine under 64-bit version as well. It's not like 64-bit version is more expensive.

[y_notm]

Somebody in an earlier post bought up an excellent point!

Vista sometimes doesn't allow me to savea file or move a file if the full filepath is over a certain length! This is ridiculous, because some of us like to keep our documents very organised. E.g. I'm doing a software engineering course at Uni & I like to put all of my programs that are Visual Basic projects in the 'Visual Basic' folder of my whole 'University Documents' folder, but I then had to change the 'Visual Basic' folder to "VB", as Vista doesn't allow me to have a longer filepath. I didn't like this because I don't often use abbrevations. I think this is ridiculous and very un-userfriendly. Also, what makes it more user friendly is that my PC's hard drive can hold a longer file path than my back-up hardrive, even though the back-up one is more GB... :blink: then, to make it worse, when copying a whole load of files & it tells you the filepath is too long, it won't let you change the name of the file there and then! :blink: this is extremely user unfriendly & doesn't need to happen, surely?

Please can somebody tell me why, giving me a excellent & reasonable reason, Vista & other Windows versions have this behaviour? Or, at least, why do they have the filepath limit so small!?

Thanks in advance.

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Now playing on iTunes: U2 - Stuck in a Moment

via FoxyTunes

NTFS supports file paths up to ~32000 characters in length; however, the shell only supports 255 chars. Apparently, it comes down to application compatibility.

As to one hard drive supporting longer file names than the other... is your external formatted as something other than NTFS? If so, I'd assume its some kind of problem with (probably) FAT32, which supports long file names only through an extension to the FS.

[redvamp128]

View settings are remembered on a per-folder basis. So if you go to a particular folder, change it to Details and move around the columns, it will be that way when you come back (unless you blow it away with the "Apply To Folders" button on another folder of the same type).

That said, we know that even with SP1 there are some reports of lost view settings, so we are spending additional resources to try and track down any possible corruption bugs that might effect this. So far, there are no known issues or anything found in testing that we can fix (that wasn't already addressed in SP1).

I know in xp using TweakUI you could increase the cache size or the number of foldsers to remember the view.

In TWEAK UI for XP

Under heading explorer... customize... folders to remember... maybe he has lots of folders and that is why it is forgetting them... Default is like 400 folders... Maybe in Vista (if it has a powertoy) or registry setting... He may have his set too low.

Possibility?

Edited June 13, 2008 by redvamp128

[EnzoFX]

Uhm, surprised as to how many Neowin ppl list "WinFS" here...

You should know better...

[zhangm Supervisor]

Uhm, surprised as to how many Neowin ppl list "WinFS" here...

You should know better...

Your expectations of people are unreasonable - its a trivial test of intellect to find ones way onto the Internet these days and post in a web forum.

[redvamp128]

As for the guy that wants to run Vista in CLI mode only ... try copying the line in the Boot.ini file... to have two lines that boot to the OS... then use Msconfig to add the extra boot options.. NO GUI. Though would be pointless if you ask me. Since Vista's main draws is the User Interface. Though what always makes me Laugh is that people Put 2 clocks up there. I mean for me the one in the right hand corner suffices for me. As well as the rotating desktop gadget. I stopped running Vista when my house got broken into... and the computer got stolen...It won't happen again. Now I am back to the ME/XP/Puppy 4.0. tri booter. Which suffices for me... and I run MS Virtual PC to run other linux distros when I feel like playing around. With that I even have some VHDs I can reload and be running NT4.0.. Win 3.1 .. Win 95 ... Win 98. I have them burned to cd's and DVD's just have to copy back to the hard drive... then remove the read only .... and of course I have the other one just sitting around with the Red Hat Linux 8.0 / Win 2k dual boot.

[Brandon Live Veteran]

2.) "File is locked or disk is full" message improved - Would be nice if we were told which process was locking down the file. Actually, I think this process explorer (add on download) already has the ability to say which files a process has locked down - so it should be pretty trivial to do a reverse lookup right?

Err... you mean like Vista does?

3.) Meaningful UAC messages - the messages in Vista do not always tell the user which process is asking for admin privileges.

Yes it does. If there is a process being invoked with admin rights, its path shows up in the "details" part of the dialog. Sometimes there's isn't a process, though, if it's a COM elevation. In that case I think the GUID is shown. Granted, neither is particularly useful - especially in that case.

5.) Please - no surprises like vista wordpad not being able to handle .doc files. What exactly was this all about? I don't quite understand why this was necessary .. I hope it wasn't to just "encourage" more people to buy office.

Actually at one point I heard it was removed for security reasons, and there was no time left to do a proper scrubbing of that code or to re-implement it. Could be mistaken, though.

[Brandon Live Veteran]

I didn't mean emulate...used the wrong word. I meant nothing different then what x64 Vista does. Why it would be waste. 2Gb will be fine under 64-bit version as well. It's not like 64-bit version is more expensive.

I didn't expect for you to ask for something that already existed in XP and Vista 64-bit editions.

A 64-bit OS on a 2GB system is a waste of RAM. Running a 64-bit OS incurs additional memory overhead versus the 32-bit version of the OS.

On a 2GB system maybe the benefits of x64 and better drivers will outweigh it. Maybe, though the NT perf experts seemed to disagree. But on a laptop like my Macbook they don't even have 64-bit drivers for everything, so I wouldn't be able to run Win7 on it if we stopped producing 32-bit builds. That would really suck as I'd hate to have to go back to Vista at this point.

Then there are 1GB and 512MB systems where people definitely don't want the overhead of a 64-bit system.

[ObiWanToby]

I just wish Cleartype were still tweakable :( Text is hard to read for me sometimes, well most of the time actually.

[Vykranth]

1.) Proper fix for MAX_PATH please. I haven't tested this with Vista (but have seen some webpages that claim that it is not fixed in Vista), but XP the limitation of 255 characters in full paths is quite an annoyance for developers or administrators working with deep hierarchies. When I posted about this here, I was told one of the Windows teams was trying to do some path shortening to reduce the occurrence of this error.

It's still there: MAX_PATH is still around 240 characters: might a limitation of the C runtime though.

- updates of paint/notepad/etc would be nice. Would there be some legal issues with MS shipping windows with, say, Notepad++ or something?

Yes, Notepad++ is under the GPL and therefore cannot be integrated into a commercial product like Windows.

Even the lighter Notepad2 is likely to cause legal trouble even if its license is not the GPL.

Err... you mean like Vista does?

Yes, but it does not work for every applications: for example, you cannot destroy a directory from explorer when it's opened in a command prompt.

You get a "The action can't be completed because the folder is open in another program" without refrence to cmd.exe

I didn't expect for you to ask for something that already existed in XP and Vista 64-bit editions.

A 64-bit OS on a 2GB system is a waste of RAM. Running a 64-bit OS incurs additional memory overhead versus the 32-bit version of the OS.

On a 2GB system maybe the benefits of x64 and better drivers will outweigh it. Maybe, though the NT perf experts seemed to disagree. But on a laptop like my Macbook they don't even have 64-bit drivers for everything, so I wouldn't be able to run Win7 on it if we stopped producing 32-bit builds. That would really suck as I'd hate to have to go back to Vista at this point.

Then there are 1GB and 512MB systems where people definitely don't want the overhead of a 64-bit system.

My guess would be that it's the old assumption that 64-bits OS are faster than 32-bits, which is in fact not a direct quality of 64-bits OS.