Okay, I'm getting fed up with my Win7 RC installation already. I just clicked a program off the start menu, and after nearly an entire MINUTE of waiting for the app to launch, I found it had opened 3 times - Windows was responding so slowly that it kept the Start menu open after I had clicked it once... then twice (thinking it hadn't registered the click as apps are known to do), then a third time!
I mean, there's the basic fundamental problem that Windows even keeps a menu open after it knows it had been activated. That issue cannot even occur in a WinXP-class operating system, but it's rampant and wild in Vista-class OSes, as if the entire GUI is constructed from a big plastic Flash framework or something.
But my issue is that my Win7 installation is getting slower than crap, and I'm downright getting sick of it. I started off with it running great, installed VMware and loaded up my previous WinXP installation into a virtual machine (Ghosted the drive to a VMDK file before installing 7). It ran great after tweaking the CPU parameters to avoid timing issues with desynchronized TSCs. Well, I fired up that same VMware machine and it hadn't even finished booting after 20 minutes of waiting (just got to the desktop and was still loading programs but unresponsive, HDD going full blast).
I dunno if I just needed to vent or what, but this crap is ridiculous. Win7 seems to be swapping to/from page file like there's no tomorrow, even though I only have 1gb in use out of 2gb RAM installed. Programs take up to an eternity to bring up if they hadn't been active in a while (paged off to disk for no good reason). What gets me is that this is known behavior for XP (and a common reason to disable the page file as I typically do), and yet two Windows versions later, Windows is still grinding away at the page file when it still has RAM available!
... Not to mention the display driver issues. Hoy... I love having no brightness control after coming out of standby, or getting a whole system crash (or just unusable video) coming out of hibernate... but hey, comes with the territory, I guess.
Win7 RC 64-bit on an Acer Extensa 4420 (recent "designed for Vista" PC), 2gb Kingston HyperX RAM, 1.9GHz Turion 64 TL-58, 160gb HDD, ATI X1200 graphics/chipset.
You think Microsoft is reading these timing statistics? Would they even notice? Or care?
edit: Also worth noting... it seems like _everything_ in 7 is slower than in XP. Navigating folders is painfully slow as it reads the file icons and locks up the shell as it finishes. Launching apps always takes several seconds before it even starts them. It's almost like it's doing the whole useless "file identification" thing (like XP does with IE7 installed, running a downloaded or from LAN file)... to EVERY file. Is anyone else having these stupidly huge performance problems?