What's this obsession with "classic" Windows?

[Choppaduel]

Why would you want your brand new something to look like that old something...

They are afraid of change and to a lesser extent, nostalgic for the days of a lean Windows OS.

[small]I still run W:XP x86[/small]

 

[Korten12]

Love 7 sooo much more then XP. Every time I go on XP at school now it feels so wierd.

 

[JediMB]

Well, not to derail your point, but vista was certainly shocking in every respect.

Windows 7 however, is awesome.

This. All the half-assed changes made for Vista were remade into actual useful features in 7, and I loved it enough that I went out and bought it for my desktop PC after trying it out on my laptop. I've never bought an OS before in my life.

EDIT:

Also, I always switched back to classic mode in XP, but Vista/7's new GUI actually looks great and is worth keeping around. XP's GUI was butt-ugly.

 

[Baneat]

I remember when Vista and 7 came out, many were complaining how they hated the look of it and wish they could opt for a W2k look.

I've also seen many businesses (such as schools, post offices, and grocery stores) with brand new computer decorated with a "Windows Vista/7" sticker, yet the OS itself looks at least a decade old.

Why would you want your brand new something to look like that old something you have marked for $5 or best offer at a garage sale? I don't get it. When 2000 hit, were people trying to make their technology look like 1990?

I like the enhancements in performance/compatibility etc, but the "classic" theme is simple and works, hence why I like it. if it made things far more complicated than W7 (like DOS) I'd switch, but W7 has all this shit surrounding it I don't use (like seeing through the grab part of your window) and all this shit I do (flicking windows to half screen and locking them etc. The classic theme allows the stuff that's actually useful and eliminates needless stuff. Apparently it performs better.. i dunno a GUI doesn't really make a difference on a quad core computer with a dedicated graphics card anyway.

 

[Owyn_Merrilin]

Okay, I'm really not sure where you're coming from on the whole classic view thing. I just compared XP in classic view to 7 on Large Icons, and the only difference that I could tell is 7 has about twice as many icons

Once again I question whether you understand what "alphabetical rows" means. Maybe you just really like the default view settings or something, but I always like to set the folder view to Details. That setting completely abolishes the idea of rows for icons. It generates a single column. The only way to do that for the CP in Win7 is to make the window dimensions less wide than what is needed to create the 2nd column. The CP is no longer even treated as a normal folder; as soon as I go to it from the address bar, the folder pane disappears, it is automatically listed as categories, and the only option is to change it to Large/Small Icons. This is in fact retarded.

-- which is a result of the OS having new features,

No it isn't. Look at all of the options. Compared to XP, relatively few of them are actually new features to the OS.

As for the annoying interface, the basic OS stuff in 7 is pretty much XP with a new coat of paint; the only confusing thing is the change from a start button to a windows icon. The problems with Word 2007 exist no matter what OS you use -- 7 is a definite example of making the interface look good without impairing functionality.

You haven't been paying attention at all. I already listed a few of the major items. I also said that if functionality were exactly the same, I wouldn't mind cosmetic changes. The Start button isn't a big deal. Removing the "Classic" menu is a huge deal. I am being forced to operate in a completely different way, one that is not anywhere near as efficient. I don't want to be forced to navigate folders from inside a tiny box with a scroll bar, nor do I want to have to type something to get it faster than using the previously mentioned obstruction.

Oh yeah, and another thing that bugs the shit out of me: I no longer can see from the status bar how much disk space selected items take up or how much disk space is left in the current drive. All it shows is how many items I have selected, which is nigh completely useless. To get just part of that back, I would have to enable the horrendous "Details Pane", which is a poor bastardization of the original Status Bar, and has only the options of Huge and Huger. Plus, why the hell would they put a "Remove Properties..." option in its right-click menu?

And while I'm on the Windows Explorer, they just had to go and ruin the spacing in the interface, adding more useless folders on the left and putting too much padding around the icons and in the column organizational selectors. And on that note, now it doesn't even matter where the icon and filename is, clicking anywhere underneath any of the informational columns selects the file. You might think it wouldn't matter, but it does affect functionality. Starting at accidental dragging of files by clicking on the Date Modified or whatever, it also extends to situations where I want to delete a few files that happen to have a longer filename than the rest of the surrounding files. I can't just drag the selector from right to left and catch only the long names and stop before the short ones, as I am now selecting every fucking file just because I moved the cursor over the part that says the file sizes.

Sheesh, U mad bro?

Sounds like somebody needs to be a bit more flexible with learning new environments. None of that bothered me in the slightest, and I certainly wouldn't consider it something worth usinge profanity over in a public forum.

 

[Owyn_Merrilin]

Sheesh, U mad bro?

Sounds like somebody needs to be a bit more flexible with learning new environments. None of that bothered me in the slightest, and I certainly wouldn't consider it something worth usinge profanity over in a public forum.

If continuing to miss the point is your pastime, I commend your excellent performance.

It is hardly a new environment. They took the old one and made it worse. There is nothing to "learn" there. The only learning will be figuring out how get around limitations or just doing without stuff that the older interface had. In the case of the control panel, it is dealing with a horrendously stupid view setting that can't be changed.

Does it look like I, or really anyone, would care about what bothered you? You're like my mom. She can barely fucking use a computer so she has no idea what kind of features are, were, or aren't there, so it doesn't matter if those features get changed or taken away. Well guess what: as soon as I see a feature change, one that is in my opinion for the worse, I can do a quick search and find a ton of other people complaining about how MS fucked things up. I guess you are like the typical Microsoft engineer; it doesn't matter what anyone else thinks, because it is good enough for you, even though as far as anyone else is concerned you might just be a massive retard. I thought that these things were the sort of stuff they had the alpha and beta testing for, but it seems user input doesn't matter one bit. Hey, as long as they can be more like a Mac, they've apparently done their work for the day.

Are you a prude or something? Liek omg dude, he cussed a little. Time to get out the holy water... and douche out my huge vagina.

I'm not the retard who doesn't know how to use a computer, you're the loser who complains every time an interface change is made. If you had a facebook account -- which is unlikely given the makeup of this site -- I'd be willing to bet you would be one of the users who complained about every little interface change, even the ones that actually made the environment more user friendly. And as for the profanity thing, I'm not a prude, but I don't swear lightly, and I almost never swear on forums, because it almost always weakens your argument. Your swearing in this post tells me that either you don't have the writing skills to get your point across without resorting to profanity, or you are actually mad enough about these changes that you were brought to the point of swearing. Either case is pathetic. Oh, and trust me, when I swear, people listen, because I don't do it often.

Beyond all that, pretty much every complaint in the post I was responding to has no basis in the actual operating system. You still haven't demonstrated that there is any appreciable difference between classic view and large icons. Hint: there isn't, you're just grasping at straws. I just pulled up Windows 95 in a virtual machine, and surprise surprise, it looks like XP's classic mode, which looks like 7's Large Icon view. Additional icons do not a completely new view make. Further, the missing information you're talking about in explorer is still there, and takes up very little space even on my 1366X768 monitor, so I don't see the problem there -- or don't most people have much bigger monitors than that these days? Finally, your complaint about the size of the icons is really a case where you need to adjust; it's an extremely minor change, which has benefits as well as costs. The situation you gave for it to be a problem is really narrow, and is easily fixed by holding down the control button and clicking on the individual icons, which has been a feature of the operating system since before Windows 95. To conclude, the good in all of this easily balances the bad, and in my opinion, outweighs it to boot.

If your pastime is being an insufferable troll, I commend your excellent performance. If you're actually being serious with all of this, you really need to loosen up a little bit, because these OS changes are not the end of the world.

 

[FalloutJack]

I remember when Vista and 7 came out, many were complaining how they hated the look of it and wish they could opt for a W2k look.

I've also seen many businesses (such as schools, post offices, and grocery stores) with brand new computer decorated with a "Windows Vista/7" sticker, yet the OS itself looks at least a decade old.

Why would you want your brand new something to look like that old something you have marked for $5 or best offer at a garage sale? I don't get it. When 2000 hit, were people trying to make their technology look like 1990?

It's a matter of streamlining the process. More modern Windows appearances and graphics use up unnecessary graphic and processing power for no other reason than to look neat. Not everyone needs special fading folders and hi-res window motions for their desktop. It slows the machine down. That, as I understand it from my geeky older brother, is the reasoning of the idea.

 

[Jekken6]

I actually like Vista's interface. It's kinda just like a shinier XP

 

[tcurt]

You all are all crazy. I have a nice shrink wrapped box of Dos 5 here to prove it. Ha!

No seriously, I still have one leftover from a machine I installed OS/2 v3 on instead.

My cursor blinks in your general direction.

 

[Aeshi]

As an OSX user I would say "Winblows" 7 is a really shitty imitator (at least the "gimmicks" in OSX never get in the way.)

The ONLY redeeming feature Winblows 7 has is that it uses less resources (and even then only because MS are doing the best to kill XP.)

 

[DeadlyYellow]

Initial impressions are often the strongest to get destroy.

I really could never get over the nagging or needless aesthetic crap that Vista had. It felt like an odd inbreeding of Windows and Mac OS. Plus the puzzlement at why it required twice as much memory to run a computer game, as opposed to XP.

 

[Smooth Operator]

Well some people are just being prats, but I can tell you why I prefer the "old" look.
Windows is an Operating System, where operations are the main focus, atleast that was the idea.
Animations and eye-candy make the use of your OS slower and annoying, adding nothing to functionality, so why the heck would I want that.

All I need is a good distinguishable overview of my files, and a snappy well ordered interface to work with, leave the looks to movies and games where they are important.

 

[fix-the-spade]

When 2000 hit, were people trying to make their technology look like 1990?

A lot of the flashy newer interfaces use a lot (a LOT) of memory and processor to do their thing. I care nothing about flashy menus and my machine runs significantly faster with the old XP style interface, so that's what I use. My PC isn't about bling damnit, it's about getting work done and playing violent, violent videogames!

Also, Windows Vista being a steaming pile of crap created a lot of XP fanatics. XP may be pushing 10 now but XP 64 is still a match for 7 and masses better than Vista, mainly because it works in (relatively speaking) an efficient manner.

 

[Sightless Wisdom]

Quite honestly I'm not sure how people could possibly ***** so much about Windows 7. It looks great, and it operates better than XP. I use Windows 7 for everything and I've not had a single problem. It's easily organized and understood, it runs well off of average hardware... what's not to love?