Windows 7 and JDK?

[appel]

I'm trying to download the latest SE JDK 6u17 for Windows 7 (64bit), but Sun says:

Your download transaction cannot be approved. Contact Customer Service.

 

[Eli Delventhal]

Bummer dude. 

But at least you won't need to wait 45 years for Apple to release JDK 7 on your machine.

[archgamie]

Windows 7 isnt that good.. XP is much better

Games published by our own members! Check 'em out!

[appel]

Windows 7 isnt that good.. XP is much better

I like the new task bar. The look n' feel isn't all that great IMO.

But first impression... the UI it feels sluggish. A fresh XP install is much more responsive.

Also, Windows 7 takes up over 700mb RAM. XP takes only 130mb.

Does Windows 7 slow down as you install more software?


- Having difficulty installing my nvidia software and drivers
- Having difficulty downloading JDK

[zammbi]

My install of Windows 7 has been great. No problems here.

Also, Windows 7 takes up over 700mb RAM. XP takes only 130mb.

It uses more ram to speed up your computer. It will release the ram if you need it.

Does Windows 7 slow down as you install more software?

I haven't noticed any drop it speeds. But I don't install crap.

[Nate]

Windows 7 is much faster than XP for me. I never wanted to use Vista and was hesitant to try 7, but it is good. I have fast hardware though. You can turn off a bunch of crap:
http://n4te.com/tools/win7.reg
http://n4te.com/tools/win7.bat

The using RAM to cache programs you use often is garbage. The above turns it off, since it isn't needed with an SSD, which everyone should have. Super fast!

[appel]

Ok..

I think I'll stick with Windows 7. First impression is good. Been using XP since it's release. First time I try out W7. Gonna buy extra 2gb memory now, as I'm on 64 bit.

It's like with new shoes, you like your old ones because they are comfortable, and the new ones don't feel quite right. But you know you need new shoes, so you ignore it for a while, and after a week the new shoes are just fine.


My favorite game (10 years old) runs great, so all my worries about W7 are absent now. Haven't installed everything yet though.

Got nvidia drivers to install (finally). No JDK yet, Sun needs to fix it's download page. Any direct dl link?

[Abuse]

Once the flawed pinning feature is removed, the quick launch bar reinstated, and the broken start menu is replaced by classicshell, Windows 7 is actually quite usable!

The explorer search still doesn't work properly; but then it's been broken ever since M$ introduced the indexing service.
Control Panel is still the broken mess that it was in Vista; but then it's been getting progressively worse ever since Windows 3.1!
They've broken Calculator too; I can see what they were trying to do - but they've done it in such a god awful way.
Explorer windows are a bit of a mess too; menus are gone, replaced by numerous toolbars that contain a hap hazard mix of regular buttons, buttons that bring up regular menus, and buttons that bring up bizarre radio menus. Whatever happened to consistent UI's built from standard recognisable components?!

They've broken the tree view in explorer too; when expanding a directory so you can see it's subdirectories, the view no-longer scrolls to show the subdirectories.
Consequently when navigating down a deep directory tree, you find you have to manually scroll down after each directory expansion.

I don't understand how the flag-ship product of (one of?) the largest IT companies on the planet can fail in such obvious & simple ways
Sit a power-user in front of a vanilla install of Windows 7 and I bet within the first 30 minutes you'll hear atleast one curse along the lines of "Omg, that's so shit. How can M$ be so fkin stupid?!"

Come to think of it, what does Windows 7 do better than XP? 

[Alan_W]

I've recently installed Windows 7 (free upgrade) on a dell laptop I bought last year.  While windows is reporting the same graphics performance score, my Java4k games are running faster under Windows 7 compared to Vista.  Probably due to later graphics driver rather than W7, but who's complaining   The taskbar now works the same as on the Mac, which after the initial surprise, is fine by me.  Start up is quicker than Vista.  User interface a bit different to XP, but am now mostly Ok with it. On the downside, there are no drivers for my old PC300 keyboard (that's a synth keyboard, not qwerty).  There weren't any for Vista either.

I'm running the 32bit Java 6 release 17.  I guess only the 64bit version is causing download issues.

[Roquen]

I'm using the 64-bit JDK on 7, with no probs.

Games published by our own members! Check 'em out!

[appel]

I'm using the 64-bit JDK on 7, with no probs.

It's working now. They've seemed to fix it.

[Markus_Persson]

I'm using the 64-bit JDK on 7, with no probs.

Same here. I do everything I can to try to make java use more ram.

[JL235]

But first impression... the UI it feels sluggish. A fresh XP install is much more responsive.

I've found the opposite, on Vista as well. XP would often freeze for me and lots of disk IO would cause WMP to start stuttering. I'd have to pause it before hitting compile in NetBeans. Both issues were solved in Vista.

On my previous PC I disabled Aero and all the other visual stuff. Windows would maximize, restore and alt+tab literally always instantly.

There are only three things I don't like about Windows 7. The pinning, the new windows media player and that they have removed being able to dock folders at the top of the screen. Fortinately you can just un-pin everything and run some apps with Vista compatability to get their non-pinning functionality back (like Windows Live Messenger). But I still have to live with the other two.

I discovered the other day that if you hold Start and press the arrow keys it moves the window around into different sized locations. Now I can get two windows appearing side-by-side without needing to reach for the mouse. I love it!

[appel]

I've found the opposite, on Vista as well.

I find this very noticeable when I'm dragging/resizing windows very fast, and also block-selecting text very fast up/down. It always lags behind my cursor.

Maybe the computer specs aren't good enough?

Quad 6600
2GB RAM (going to be upgrading to 4GB soon)
nVidia 8800 GT

I'd think this would be sufficient.

[Roquen]

Same here. I do everything I can to try to make java use more ram.

  Well, somebody has to test the new pointer compression feature.

[JL235]

I find this very noticeable when I'm dragging/resizing windows very fast, and also block-selecting text very fast up/down. It always lags behind my cursor.

Maybe the computer specs aren't good enough?

Quad 6600
2GB RAM (going to be upgrading to 4GB soon)
nVidia 8800 GT

I'd think this would be sufficient.

My experience of Vista was on a 2ghz Athlon 64 with a Geforce 6600GT and 1gb of very slow ram. I had none of the issues you encountered and as I said above it was _much_ more responsive (and stable) then XP.

But I did always have it set to not redraw the contents of windows whilst resizing and moving. You could try this.

[Eli Delventhal]

I discovered the other day that if you hold Start and press the arrow keys it moves the window around into different sized locations. Now I can get two windows appearing side-by-side without needing to reach for the mouse. I love it!

Yeah, it's a really cool feature, although I discovered it in 2003 and was most amazed!

Hm, I just realized that's because I'm using Mac OS X, not Windows 7. :/

[Nate]

The pinning isn't so bad, just set the minimum width of task bar items, so you can read the names instead of having just icons. I think it is:
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop\WindowMetrics\MinWidth=350

Calculator is stupid. Can't do hex to dec any more! I found an app called Calculator Plus that is the old calculator.

I've never seen the explorer tree view not scroll correctly. There are some settings to have it behave stupidly, which I believe are the defaults.

Hm, I just realized that's because I'm using Mac OS X, not Windows 7. :/

Nice to see a moderator trolling.

[JL235]

I love the new calculator! Useful for doing bit-twidling coding.

[woogley]

Once the flawed pinning feature is removed, the quick launch bar reinstated...

This sounds like a "get off my lawn" comment to me. The pinning feature is far superior to quick launch.

[Abuse]

This sounds like a "get off my lawn" comment to me. The pinning feature is far superior to quick launch.

That's what I initially thought; but a few weeks using it, and I found all sorts of niggling problems.
1) Applications that minimize themselves to the system tray have no taskbar icon, consequently their pinned icon no-longer appears highlighted.
2) Launching new instances of existing applications requires more user actions; either shift-click, or right click->menu->left click.
3) Unless you select 'always combine, hide labels', pinned applications are not positionally coherent - they move about depending upon what other applications are running.
4) If you do select 'always combine, hide labels', you lose application title bars.

The classic XP interface can be explained clearly and concisely with a simple diagram:

[Launchable Applications][Active applications ...... ][ ...... Persistent applications]
     (quick-launch bar)                    (task bar)                         (system tray)

The way in which applications move between these distinct states is equally simple to understand.

The Windows 7 interface cannot be explained with such a trivial diagram; definitely not KISS

[appel]

This sounds like a "get off my lawn" comment to me. The pinning feature is far superior to quick launch.

I agree... I like it. No more bloated task bar.

[princec]

My task bar has never been bloated. I always expand it to 2 or 3 rows, have about 20 odd quick launches, and generally there's only ever about 4-6 apps running. Maybe people should possibly get used to closing windows they don't want cluttering the place up... might explain why a lot of people complain about their computer running slowly too... 

Cas

[JL235]

or just move the taskbar to the left side. I have 28 quick launch icons and can open 18 windows before running out of room. Plus I have quick links to all of my document folders on the startmenu too. There is tonnes of room if you have it vertically.

[woogley]

@Abuse

I don't really agree with any of your points. I rather like the side-by-side grouping, the resortability, etc.

But, if you really want to go back to the dark ages, you can just ...

1. Right-click
2. Click toolbars -> new toolbar
3. Select a folder that will contain all your quick launches

Hey, you can even select the folder that most apps install their quick launch icons by default. Ta-da, the icons act just like quick launch ..

[JL235]

1) Applications that minimize themselves to the system tray have no taskbar icon, consequently their pinned icon no-longer appears highlighted.
2) Launching new instances of existing applications requires more user actions; either shift-click, or right click->menu->left click.

These annoyed me too, that's why I don't use pinning. Especially that apps which minimize to the tray are still available on the start menu as a pin. To me that's mixing quick launch functionality along with the task bar. Windows Live Messenger is a good example. I don't want to see it listed next to the apps I'm running when it's window is closed. That is why I close it. I want it to run hidden in the background so it only appeares when people send me messages.

One thing to bear in mind though is that the majority of PC users are not as confident with them as we are. There are lots of features I'd prefer to turn off which were added to make using Windows more friendly. For example starting with Vista when you minimize and restore a window it physically moves down and back from the taskbar. I don't like it because when I restore a window it sometimes feels like they are trying to fly out and hit me in the face. But this was added because some users would minimize a window and not know that it's only minimized to the taskbar. They wouldn't know how to get it back.

[Abuse]

Arguing which is the 'better' user interface is futile.
No doubt M$ spent millions on researching which interface benefitted the most users.
Though I do wonder whether their research focused on satisfying the 'most users', or the 'most user hours' - statistically the latter would make more sense, but financially the former is better for M$.

Ultimately what I think is inexcusable is that the interface cannot out-of-the-box be customized sufficiently to suite all users.

[appel]

Ultimately what I think is inexcusable is that the interface cannot out-of-the-box be customized sufficiently to suite all users.

I agree with that statement.

Although I do like Windows 7 I must criticize that I don't see much option of customizing the task bar. I can imagine not everyone will like that pinned stuff.

I also dislike that you're not able to customize the look n' feel, you're pretty much limited to changing the opacity and and color.

Finally, which I do like, they have removed that "Documents and Settings" crap folder, and the user directory doesn't fill up with nonsense crap folders. It's been renamed to "Users/". There is also a "Downloads" folder there!! Makes much more sense.

"Program Files" is also a crap name, should just name it "Programs" or "Applications". I hate lengthy names with spaces. I mean, why would they call it "Program Files"... isn't it pretty much given that there are FILES in there? What else could there be if not FILES? That's like calling the "Windows" folder "Windows Files".

[woogley]

Ultimately what I think is inexcusable is that the interface cannot out-of-the-box be customized sufficiently to suite all users.

I guess, but I gave you a solution for your problem.

[JL235]

Although I do like Windows 7 I must criticize that I don't see much option of customizing the task bar. I can imagine not everyone will like that pinned stuff.

Right-click the app and then select 'unpin this program from the taskbar'. That's it!

Finally, which I do like, they have removed that "Documents and Settings" crap folder, and the user directory doesn't fill up with nonsense crap folders. It's been renamed to "Users/". There is also a "Downloads" folder there!! Makes much more sense.

"Program Files" is also a crap name, should just name it "Programs" or "Applications". I hate lengthy names with spaces. I mean, why would they call it "Program Files"... isn't it pretty much given that there are FILES in there? What else could there be if not FILES? That's like calling the "Windows" folder "Windows Files".

Agreed, but I can't help thinking that it's only command-line users who notice this.