Chrome is a killer browser. Because it is _very_ fast and renders correctly most of the time.

The problem is that they insist on ALSO breaking a lot of UI conventions and inventing their own. That's nice, but one should have the choice to use a "normal" UI. Firefox with the Chrome engine, or Chrome enginge with Firefox UI would be a killer.

that modern PCs aren't able to go into a 2 watts mode that still listens to signals from keyboard, mouse, remote connections from the network etc. to wake it up.

Wake On LAN is too esoteric. Stand by (or suspend or hibernate) works great, but is not seamlessly able to just wake up when I do a remote connection or move the mouse.

Frankly, a computer doing nothing than just idling in Windows (or Linux, or...) shouldn't use more than a couple of watts.

Problem solved.

Apple is evil. Much, much, much more evil than Microsoft.

Closed technologies, controlled monopolized pricing etc. Inferior technology sold to fanboys as "better".

Macs are expensive. They're not high-end. They're just expensive. My computers perform a lot better than any Mac and they are all cheaper than the cheapest Mac.

Macs are expensive.

This is a modest Athlon 64 X2 2200 Mhz with 1GB of RAM. I realize that modern systems have more power than this, especially more RAM, but on the other hand it's not like Windows 7 is accessing the page file all the time. In fact, when I have done this kind of test, there's no hard disk activity at all, and plenty of free physical memory.

Also, we're talking about netbooks here which are even slower than this system. And while XP shines on this system, Windows 7 and Vista does not.

My XP does not get slower with time, as you suggest. But then, I'm fairly conscious about what software I install and which services are running etc.

Also, remember that I am comparing a newly installed Windows 7 with an "old" XP install, so even if it _is_ slower than a newly installed XP, the newly installed Windows 7 is still even slower, much more so in fact.

I really want to like Windows 7.

On one hand, I hate Microsoft as much as the next guy.

On the other hand, I use their software everyday at work. And if the market leader massively improves their (somewhat crappy) software, it forces the competitors to get better too.

For instance, IE8 seems much faster and better than IE7 (and of course IE6). This will hopefully wake up Mozilla and force them to improve on Firefox.

Regarding Windows 7, I can see that the memory footprint is lower, and that's a good thing.

=====> But it still _feels_ much slower than XP in everyday use! =====

I am talking about the little things that make up the experience of responsiveness. It just takes a noticeable amount of milliseconds more when I click on an icon, until the OS reacts. Opening a new browser window just have that extra lag. Copying files feels slower. Etc.

At first, I sort of liked Windows 7 and ran it for a couple of weeks. Then I booted back into XP (not a fresh installation of XP, mind you). I was depressed by how much snappier XP feels. I was hoping to have a good reason to ditch XP.

Makers of desktop operating systems should focus intensively on responsiveness. The OS should react as fast as possible on any user request, regardless of whatever else it is doing.

It's fair enough that some heavy calculation takes longer time if you have some other heavy job or service running, but the initial latency from any user request until you get some sort of reaction should be as low as possible. And XP is much better in this regard than Windows 7 or Vista (and also faster than all Linux distros I've been running).

To use an analogy from network land: I would much rather have 10 ms ping times and 1 Mbps than 1000 ms ping times and 100 Mbps.

I am one of those young developers, I've got about three years of full time experience after university.

I didn't expect the things you mention, but I expected something else.

I expected a focus on quality and a need for the knowledge and experience I had gained before and during my formal education. I expected software companies to take software as serious as bridge building engineering companies take bridge building.

What I have found in the companies that I have been in and that I know of otherwise, is that the even the most basic of quality requirements and technical decency are rejected.

Just make the quickest and dirtiest fix and ship something that is at best a broken prototype. That WILL come back to bite our proverbial ass later.

Whenever I question this or try to go for the long term quality solution and do things the right way, I get a response from seniors that feels a little bit like they think I am just being narcissistic. Just make it work. Quickly. No time for the fancy stuff (meaning the most basic stuff). Just keep pushing a growing mountain of technical debt in front of you.