Brian, you'll probably be pleasantly surprised how few problems you encounter using old programs on Windows 7. I have loads of old stuff, and everything runs fine, even two ancient programs over a decade old - Office 97 and Corel Ventura 8. No problem getting old hardware working - if a Windows 7 driver wasn't available, I found the Vista one worked fine.
Prior to the new computer, we were running Windows 2000 and XP.
<whine>
I generally like Windows 7 but Microsoft have automated some things that drive me nuts! Most are to do with changes to Windows Explorer:
• The files pane refreshes automatically, so if you copy files into a folder or create a new folder, the items don't stay at the end the files until the folder is closed/reopened or manually refreshed but instead are immediately placed among all the other files/folders in sort order (e.g. by name, date, etc.). Really annoying: if you want to work on those files you just copied/created, you have to either select a different sort order (e.g. date modified) or try and find them individually - a right pain if you have hundreds of files with identical properties except for their name (my situation)!
• Manual sort has been removed. I used to arrange photographs by visual appearance by dragging them around - very useful when working out hanging plans for exhibitions to see which photos work together. Now, only automatic sorting is allowed, so I have to name my photos with numbers and change the number to change the order! Grrr!
• Image thumbnails are now half the size of those used in XP. Makes it more difficult to see the images properly and make judgements about them.
• When you select a folder in the navigation pane, it jumps to the bottom of the pane, hiding all the subfolders in the selected folder, forcing you to scroll the folder tree upwards. This is irritating and pointless behaviour. This can be lessened by breaking synchronisation between the navigation and file panes by deselecting "Automatically expand to current folder" in Folder Options - but that, of course, has its own drawbacks. Grrr again!
Windows search doesn't work well either compared with Windows XP:
• Rather than the brute force Windows XP method, Windows 7 can only use indexing - if a file's not indexed, it won't be found, and if a file type isn't flagged for contents searching, Windows won't search inside it until you add it. And updating the index is not instantaneous, which means that files several hours old may not be found.
• Options for advanced search no longer available. Some are built into the standard search (e.g. searching subfolders) but most options are now implemented using a search syntax and manually typing your search parameters (e.g. searching for a specific file type). Again, a right pain in the ar**! Way more user-unfriendly than Windows XP...
• Indexing doesn't work well. Whatever I do I cannot get Windows 7 to search inside my Word files.
In short, I don't think Windows 7 is as great as all the reviews make it out to be. I guess it's been "dumbed down" because, presumably, Microsoft wants to make Windows as easy to use for the "typical" user - who's presumably not especially computer-literate.
But the changes make Windows 7 more awkward to use if you are computer-savvy.
Why couldn't MS have left those options in? Why can't I turn off auto-sorting? Turn on manual file arrangement? Use brute force searching?
It's not a case of not liking change. I like change. But change should provide an alternative way of dong something - NOT take away choice! For example, there is no longer an easy way to play around with the arrangement of image thumbnails for exhibitions - Windows won't do it, nor have I found any software that lets me drag around thumbnails manually: I've had to resort to printing out thumbnails of photos and shuffling these around on my real, wood desktop. (Yes, I can arrange thumbnails on the Windows Desktop - but the Windows 7 thumbnails are too small to see properly!)
Although I won't be going back to Windows XP - it is certainly more usable than Windows 7, albeit more ugly. Personally, I wish I'd upgraded to Vista instead of Windows 7, as Vista retains some of those useful features taken away in Windows 7.
</whine>
