Will Windows 7 be better for imaging?

[Geoff F]

I've never been really happy with Windows XP and, as far as possible, I try to operate it in a similar way to Windows 98.

When Microsoft were developing Windows 7, I was advised that it would be better for photo editing and desktop publishing, etc; while XP and now Vista would be aimed more at the Home Entertainment market.

I have been offered a Windows 7 update package for £45 or around double that for the pro version. There may possibly be even better offers around.

So does anybody have any advanced information about how this system will work, with particular reference for photographers.

[kevinbythebeach]

I dunno but last time i checked windows 7 was being offered FREE by microsoft and it came with a one year product key... Windows 7 is Microsofts way of making up for VISTA...

Windoes XP is one of the better OS they have ever made.

I dunno what u mean by better for photogs,,,do you mean quicker or faster at loading images?
I dont use windows in regards to Photography except int he creation of storage files of photos,,,other than that I uess DPP and PS....So maybe your question is a hardware question?

[kevinbythebeach]

PS I'd wait till maybe next year before I switch over to windows 7...
Let them get the bugs worked out and drivers made for software and hardware..

[kevinbythebeach]

Here is the Link to get it for free....


http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/e...x?ITPID=wcfeed


its the final test version before they release it


it doesnt hit the market till october 22, 2009...


so if someone is trying to sell it too you now,,,,your getting ripped off..

[Geoff F]

It is from Amazon so the company is reliable but they are calling it a 'pre order' and state that this is a maximum price so it could be cheaper.

I use independant photo editing software but find XP a bit awkward, for my pre digital mind, to understand sometimes. I could cope with 98 but find making adjustments to settings or moving files around a bit of a strain with XP, which is why I didn't upgrade to Vista. But that is probably 99% me trying to do things my way instead of following the 'Microsoft plan'.

I have never been able to understand Microsoft programmes like Word, etc, although I am fine with more complicated third party software, providing it thinks like me. A long time ago I was a printer so I still think like that. To me, most of the Microsoft programmes appear more US office work orientated; and just seem unnatural to me.

So I just wondered if this new version would appear more logical to me. I expect it will be discussed at length in the computer magazines.

[kevinbythebeach]

Its 119.99 usd and 199.99 here...I was just wondering if someone said they had a final copy and was trying to sell you it...

I find Xp very easy to access folders and files...but ive been using it for awhile....Xp is for the most part click and drag or copy and paste for me...
Windows 7 looks like a mix of Vista and XP....
some hefty system requirements too....1 GB of ram and 16 gb free HD space...
so once again ppl with sub par systems are gonna gripe and moan about it not working blah blah blah...and they dont know why . it should be kinda funny to watch....

[Colin Southern]

I expect it will be discussed at length in the computer magazines.

No doubt it will be given the usual in-depth technical reviews by magazine writers (as opposed to someone who actually knows what they're talking about), along with the usual bias ...

... that is if they can find enough space for the "review" between the advertisements and usual "101 ways to improve your computer's speed" type "advice". (sort of akin to the photographic magazine equivalent of "learn how to take pictures like a pro using your cell phone"

Not sure how other feel about such magazines, but personally, I've just given up on them -- each one seems to be the same - usually starts with some person being awarded "letter of the week" for the usual Microsoft/Telco bash - bunch of advertising and topped off with some very biased opinion from a bunch of people paid to write biased opinion to sell the magazines.

As for Windows 7, haven't seen it personally - however - in the past it's always worked along the lines of "each new operating system does more than the previous version - to do more it needs to run more lines of code - and this consumes more resources". People always seem to forget this, and the first thing we always hear is "how much slower it is than it's predecessor" - Vista being the classic example. Vista got a LOT of bad press (most of it from me) - since XP ran OK in 512MB RAM we expected Vista to follow the usual line and require around 1GB; WRONG - In my opinion it's 4GB or nothing is you want acceptable performance. Unfortunately 32 bit operating systems only have 4 gigs of address space - some of which is needed for other things - so even with 4GB of RAM, the system only sees around 3.3GB (sky coming down) - and with Vista being a much bigger OS than XP (ground rising up to meet it) what we ended up with is less room for programs to run. Ideal solution? ... Run 64 Bit operating systems where the sky's the limit - where Vista runs very nicely on 8 or 12GB RAM (sounds like a horrendous amout of RAM - and it is compared to days gone by - but "so what" - RAM is cheap).

Only downside of course is availability of drivers for 64bit OSs - thankfully it's no longer a problem for most - but one still does have to do one's homework.

[Davey]

Hmmm I don't think you can tell how much "better" an OS will be at photo editing, it's purely dependent on imaging applications and their support and exactly what features you're looking for. Vista isn't the demon it's made out to be, I for one am happy enough with it and officially I'm expected to be in the "Vista is satan" camp, I've been a slackware user for over 10 years but mentioning any version of windows (or even any proprietary software) on slack forums starts up a whole poo storm and calls of "burn the heretic" usually.

The difference between OSes can be huge and sometimes a different approach may suit your needs better but sometimes not. Vista does things differently from xp, the way it handles many many things is different so if you need say application side independent sound mixing then vista fits that when xp cannot do it. Same with volume management policies, networking and so on. For photo editing there isn't too much in way of demands that are not met by vista, and the main thing is support and if it's being supported by the likes of adobe then it's good for the most part.

Speed and stability situation gets complex, people want everything faster and improved. Problem is you can't improve without change and change usually requires more power as things get more complex so more cpu, gpu, memory etc hungry like colin says. There is always the reviewers who say it's bad because this years OS (designed with modern machines in mind) runs poorly on a 8 year old rig compared to the 9 year old OS it ran previously. Lightweight is good for running on older machines but microsoft don't provide for that end of the market, they drop support on OSes ones the base they were aimed at become obsolete. Also it comes at a price, lightweight often means it's cut down so not a good all rounder or takes more end user input to setup and MS develop mainly for the masses who need the machine to do everything with little input or tech ability which is how it should be despite what the geeks say (I can say that I am one ).

People just don't understand what's beneath the surface when it comes to OSes and judge them based on very very superficial reasons and call bad comparissons when 99% of the time it's user error and lack of knowledgable setup and understanding or comparing very different processes that look the same on the surface. I would take what a lot of photo mag writers say about an OS with a pinch of salt personally because they don't tend to have a clue about that side of things.

[Colin Southern]

Hmmm I don't think you can tell how much "better" an OS will be at photo editing.

Probably the biggest performance gains will come from the machines with the most memory - and CS4 is already out in 64Bit edition. Having said that though, from a post-processing perspective, you'd have to be working on some seriously big projects to gain any significant advantages.

I think people worry too much - any modern machine with enough RAM should be fine for general image work

[Davey]

I'm making a big pano for my dad that he wants printing quite large for his living room wall but I wanted it crisp up close and due to my cameras res and and technical reasons with my sensor etc etc I decided on a stitch from approx 44 images! Well it's really just 11 images wide since I've shot with the cam mounted at 90degrees in portrait aspect and to fit whole water and sky in at zoom coupled with extra due to forward thinking with regard to cropping I took 2 rows of 11 (a top and bottom). Night scene means some bits dark some well lit so I took 2 exposures for each which doubled the number (not HDR, I stitched both equally and in process of masking them blown bits in as see fit). All images are about 15 to 20% overlap and weigh in at 5Mpix each, all raw developed at 16bit lossless.

I'm working on it on an average regular rig nothing special, with 4Gb of ram, phenom 8550 cpu (3core) using cs4 in either windows vista (32bit home) or zenwalk (2.6.28.7 32bit vanilla kernel) and it's fine. Some things have latency issues but nothing major Eg. 3 or 4 sec lag on the spot heal brush effect to be shown, nothing major. Not many people need more than that, for those that do need silly power clustering is probably the way they will go and windows 7 nor any other ms product is suited to that since there are other alternatives more suited to clusters. Sayng that some of my image apps (mainly raytracing/renderers) under windows will perform well enough networked (5 rigs on cat6 wired lan) but to be honest I never need the extra power to bother.

I don't think much stuff is 64bit optimised yet to make the switch myself although see windows and unix driver situation is getting pretty good (although 3rd party stuff can be an issue). It is the way to go though since in a few years the 4Gb max address space will become a problem for the new breed of software.

[Colin Southern]

I've done similar exercises - and I agree - it just takes a bit of planning and a bit of patience.

Early testing of the 64 bit Photoshop code was showing around a 20% performance increase, but it's when you get into the huge images that 64 bit really kicks in (well not 64 bit per sec, it's really any extra RAM on a 64 bit platform (eg 8GB, 12GB etc). Even running 32 bit PS on a 64 Bit PC is advantagious, as the program can take advantage of up to 3GB for PS -v- about 3.3GB (max) for the entire PC on a 32 Bit OS.

[milleniummuppet]

Well, here we go, someone who has actually been using windows 7 since beta.

I was very impressed with windows 7.

The best way to describe windows 7 has already been said - a combo of XP and vista.
Basically windows 7 is built upon the core vista technology, and redesigned to work much much more efficiently "and it worked".

This is nothing like vista's dog-slow reputation - and I say this coming from XP.
On my machine it is faster than XP and this is the detailed specs:

Intel P4 3Ghz hyper-threading processor
2 x 512mb DDR ram chipsets (only 200mhz ) in dual channel
Gigabyete Radeon X800 XL 256mb graphics card
2 x 80gb HDD's

And it runs just how I need it to, I work on a lot of large size images and it seems to handle it almost fine when working this large. I intend on upgrading to 2gb of ram shortly, and this should sort out the lag with large sizes ( eg 1 gb files etc ).

something else I noticed that windows 7 does is share some of the ram to the graphics card. This creates a noticible performance boost graphically, which is good for 7 because of its 'aero' interface.

Something you have to watch out for with 7 is graphics. If your graphics card is stingey then 7 will steal a lot of your CPU and RAM to power areo - this is also something I have personally tested, so I know first-hand.

The best advice I could give here would be to try Windows 7 NOW.
The reason I say this is because now - its free - in a while - it won't be.
Dual boot with both XP and 7 ( dual boot - NOT virtual machine 'this is not a fair test ) and evaluate weather you think it is worth buying for your current machine.
This way you will know weather you computer is capable of achieving what you want it to achieve - which saves any disappointment.

Hope this helps ,

[Colin Southern]

The best advice I could give here would be to try Windows 7 NOW.
The reason I say this is because now - its free - in a while - it won't be.

However - usually - the "free" betas / RTMs are time-lifed - so after a year or so they stop working.

[milleniummuppet]

Dual boot with both XP and 7 ( dual boot - NOT virtual machine 'this is not a fair test ) and evaluate weather you think it is worth buying for your current machine.

Yip. That's what I was implying .