51 Ways To Make Windows 7 More Gamer Friendly

This is Part 3 of a series of articles dealing with Windows 7.

If you haven’t had a bit of sarcasm lately, make sure to check out Part 1: What If God Himself Made The Next Windows OS and Part 2: Microsoft, Here’s The Top 17 Ways To Screw Your Next Windows OS.

In this part, let’s take a look at how Microsoft can make Windows 7 even better for gamers (pun unintended).

1. Improve the Windows Games user interface
2. Allow users to easily and quickly add a game to the list
3. That game doesn’t have to be in an online database
4. List the recently played games on the right. We gamers tend to forget amidst the tens of hundreds of games we play
5. Make patches available from the interface
6. Allow for one click patch installation, and without much hassles
7. Reduce the Windows 7 system requirements
8. Vista system requirements are still high
9. Bring Windows 7’s performance up to par with XP
10. Then improve upon that and take it a step farther
11. Don’t force us to upgrade. We’ll upgrade in due time
12. Make file copying much faster
13. Make networking with previous versions of Windows easier
14. Don’t be a system resource hog
15. Have greater support of different drivers from Day 1
16. Allow us to have a friend list from the Windows Games interface
17. Better yet, add a system tray icon
18. Automatically notify users when their friends are online
19. Make it easier to accept a game invite
20. Make it easier to send a game invite, without actually having to fire up the game
21. The Xbox 360 interface is cool
22. Have something similar in Windows, especially the Blades
23. Integrate Games For Windows Live within Windows
24. We don’t like starting up Halo 2 just to access Windows Live
25. Have a superior port of Halo 3 on Windows
26. Have it ready on Windows 7 Launch Day
27. Add digital games downloads
28. Learn from Valve and take pointers from the superb Steam interface
29. Steam cloud is cool
30. Have something similar in Windows 7
31. Make a Windows 7 Gamer edition with exclusive gamer software, demos, even free games
32. Stop making pointless iterations of Windows
33. Don’t package bloated software
34. Don’t charge excessively for the latest Windows 7. It’s bad enough we have to pay 50 bucks for boxed games
35. Better yet, make digital downloads significantly cheaper than boxed games. Take advantage of economies of large scale (production)
36. Reduce Windows booting time
37. Cache the most played games so that it loads faster
38. Have a central save games database
39. Make it easy to back up game saves. That way we won’t have to replay all over again when Windows goes bonkers
40. Don’t let the Games For Windows brand go to waste
41. Standardize PC games and have support from major developers/publishers
42. Persuade retailers to give more retail shelf space to Games For Windows games
43. Persuade developers and publishers to use Games For Windows Live
44. Don’t get crazy ideas and start charging extra for GFW Live
45. Further promote Windows as a gaming platform
46. Make it easier to re-map the buttons on gamepads, especially the 360 controller for the PC
47. NTFS is getting old, where’s WinFS?
48. The compatibility function doesn’t always work
49. Fix that
50. Add greater backward compatibility with older games
51. Get rid of UAC prompts. We don’t want it to pop up every time a new game is installed

Well, that pretty much sums up the most annoyances of Vista. What more would you add to the list?

Be Sure To Read

Part 1: What If God Himself Made The Next Windows OS
Part 2: Microsoft, Here’s The Top 17 Ways To Screw Your Next Windows OS