Windows 7 Catch-All

Malor wrote:

Basically, from what I'm gathering, Win7 is Vista with the Mac's quick launch bar and a better networking protocol for home users.

Oh, and it's got several small but nice UI improvements; dragging a window to the top of the screen maximizes it, and dragging it to the left or right side resizes it to take exactly the left or right half of the screen. And shaking a window while dragging it does something, but I forgot what -- it might collapse all other windows.

It also uses hover to show you windows -- if you hover over a program group in the taskbar, it will turn all other programs transparent, and just show windows for that one. If you hover over the show desktop button, it turns all windows transparent, so you can see the desktop, but can't click on things unless you click on the button first.

And the numerous performance increases. But I think the person that likened it to KDE's taskbar/plasma stuff is more accurate than any comparisons to it resembling Mac anything.

There are also updates to various little programs, like the calculator, and a removal of significant included Windows bloat (most likely with the hope you'll download the Windows Live Suite, which isn't half bad.)

I haven't tooled around with it much, but I've already noticed that it's "zippier" (I think someone else already mentioned this too.)

Honestly with nothing but performance increases, I'd be satisfied. Of course, I didn't have to pay for Vista, and I'll probably get a "free" Windows 7 Ultimate license through my school's technology fees, so my opinion on the issue is biased.

I don't see it as much different from the Windows 95/98 to XP jump, in that superficially they look and behave the same but on an everyday use level, XP was a lot more satisfying. Maybe that says something negative about Microsoft's development process.

The first thing I did was to reduce the UAC to hardly ever bother me and to never dim the screen. I hated that part even when the prompts didn't bother me in Vista.

I had a hell of a time installing it. First Vista claimed I had no space with which to shrink my current partition and create a new one. I defragged my hard drive with multiple tools to move the system files, shrank the partition, ran a "quick" NTFS format. Windows 7 would not install. I burned the DVD 3 times before I switched from Deepburner, which has never failed me before, to ImgBurn. I also did a full, not quick, format of the partition I made for Windows 7. After that, it worked fine, but if you're having problems where the Windows 7 install hangs at "Expanding files" on 0%, you might want to try that out.

Edit:

Also, if Windows 7 can't "see" your other partitions, it might be because it assigned the partition you installed Windows 7 onto the drive letter "C", so now the other partition doesn't have one. Right-click "Computer" in the start menu, then "manage", then I think "Storage", and just pick the other partition and assign it a drive letter.

unntrlaffinity wrote:

TDon't do that. It expires in August, and I don't think they're guaranteeing the ability to upgrade from the beta to the final. It'd be a lot safer to make a 20gig partition to install Windows 7 Beta on, unless you don't mind backing up your data all over again or don't care if you have to wipe your system again.

I don't care, I normally reinstall my OS every few months anyway. I'm constantly fooling with crap I should not and this noramlly ends in tears of re-install. If I can play with it for it few months I might purchase this OS day one, as I'm parked on XP now as the laptop that was really close to my desktop specs (when we got it) ran like absolute crap with vista installed.

I installed Windows 7 (32 bit) on VirtualBox (Linux) though I haven't spent much time with it.

The installation was surprisingly fast (under 30 minutes) and the interface feels quite snappy. I wanted to test the system requirements and constrained the virtual machine to 256 MiB RAM (resulting in Windows alone using 88%). It worked quite well and YouTube videos played flawlessly as far as I could tell.

All in all, its performance impressed me quite a bit. I don't see another reason that would justify an upgrade, though, since everything else screams Vista. However, as I said, I haven't spent much time with it yet.

edit:
I forgot to mention: The 32 bit version needs 4.9 GiB HDD space. The 64 bit version needs quite a bit more (the download is also much bigger).

edit2:
I got that wrong, the 32 bit version seems to need 6.15 GiB.

Pharacon wrote:

I don't care, I normally reinstall my OS every few months anyway. I'm constantly fooling with crap I should not and this noramlly ends in tears of re-install. If I can play with it for it few months I might purchase this OS day one, as I'm parked on XP now as the laptop that was really close to my desktop specs (when we got it) ran like absolute crap with vista installed.

I actually really like all the stupid little changes so far. Like the pinned combination quicklaunch/taskbar, and the way it focuses on whatever you mouseover on the preview thumbnail. I just thought if you install these types of things on a partition, you can constantly have a partition with your data that's safe/easy to backup, and it would even streamline your reinstalling your OS whenever you liked.

My laptop isn't very powerful, and it's running 7 like a champ so far.

Has anyone else that's installed this taken a look at their "windows experience" score? I just noticed that everything appears to be normal with the exception of my HDD. That's getting a score of 2. If I remember correctly in Vista it was around 4 or 5.

I also just noticed that there is no paging file on my C drive although I can't tell if that was there before I installed the new OS or not. I don't even have the option to put the paging file on my C drive it's not an option.

JC wrote:

I also just noticed that there is no paging file on my C drive although I can't tell if that was there before I installed the new OS or not. I don't even have the option to put the paging file on my C drive it's not an option.

I haven't used it much because it's on my spare PC, so I can't be too sure. But what I did notice is that when you setup Windows 7 it creates (at least for me) a small separate parition as well as the main one for the OS. Perhaps it's setup for the paging file?

Some research on the internet seems to indicate a lot of people are getting the HDD score of 2.0 and the best guess is that Windows 7 has some generic driver in place.

As for the paging file it let me set the paging file on my D drive. I'm just wondering if it skips the page file because I have 3GB of RAM or perhaps it is related to the HDD score of 2.0.

Turning off write caching within windows results in the score jumping up to 5.4 on the HDD.

oh well

I haven't had a paging file issue, looking at the disk management stuff mine appears to be about 1.8gigs, same as in Vista.

Overall I like how the networking capabilities work now. There are a few downsides though. In Windows 7, my overall ability to connect to random "junky" unprotected wifi seems to have decreased a lot. The wifi at the library I work at will connect, but only locally, unless I try connecting to the much weaker (and protected) campus wifi. Also, when using my "wokfi" at home, Windows 7 can't connect to two nearby networks I'm using fine right now in Vista (literally, right now, to post this.)

unntrlaffinity wrote:

TDon't do that. It expires in August, and I don't think they're guaranteeing the ability to upgrade from the beta to the final. It'd be a lot safer to make a 20gig partition to install Windows 7 Beta on, unless you don't mind backing up your data all over again or don't care if you have to wipe your system again.

IMAGE(http://i41.tinypic.com/11iohvl.png)
Shouldn't that do the trick? I haven't tried that tool yet but it sounds like pretty useful utility. (btw: Snipping Tool was great idea, it took me 30 seconds to take screenshot and upload it)

Overally I'm really, really impressed. I haven't even bothered to use Vista so unlike you I'm not impressed by it's performance, but rather it's usability. I really like new tools, interface and libraries in this system.

unntrlaffinity wrote:

Also, if Windows 7 can't "see" your other partitions, it might be because it assigned the partition you installed Windows 7 onto the drive letter "C", so now the other partition doesn't have one. Right-click "Computer" in the start menu, then "manage", then I think "Storage", and just pick the other partition and assign it a drive letter.

Thanks for that. Now I could copy my bookmarks and settings from XP.

Another quick tip if you're having problems installing software that worked in Vista or XP, right click on the .exe and select "Troubleshoot compatibility". You'll get an option for "It used to work in blah blah", then pick the OS it worked in, XP, Vista, whatever.

It didn't fix the problems I've been having trying to install drivers for my wireless adapter or antivirus, but it's still handy.

UCRC wrote:

Shouldn't that do the trick? I haven't tried that tool yet but it sounds like pretty useful utility. (btw: Snipping Tool was great idea, it took me 30 seconds to take screenshot and upload it)

It might, who knows. Maybe they'll change one little thing and your backup would be a compressed pile of useless. All I was pointing out was that they're not guaranteeing any sort of compatibility between the two, and the whole issue can easily be avoided by taking 10 minutes to create a partition. I'm just saying.

Anyone tried gaming on it yet? Specifically, TF2 or L4D?

unntrlaffinity wrote:
UCRC wrote:

Shouldn't that do the trick? I haven't tried that tool yet but it sounds like pretty useful utility. (btw: Snipping Tool was great idea, it took me 30 seconds to take screenshot and upload it)

It might, who knows. Maybe they'll change one little thing and your backup would be a compressed pile of useless. All I was pointing out was that they're not guaranteeing any sort of compatibility between the two, and the whole issue can easily be avoided by taking 10 minutes to create a partition. I'm just saying.

Sure, I see your point, I won't be getting rid of XP until full version is out, but I'm pretty sure that this whole 'transfer settings' thing was developed with beta->full transition in mind.

OK I aborted the install on my main rig as GTA 4 does not work worth a hoot on it. If I find a fix I will drop it on my desktop.

Normally the reason why I reformat and reinstall is because I add a piece of hardware so to dump all the crap I don't need (drives etc) I just backup and reinstall the OS. Instead of taking my time and cleaning up the registry.

Pharacon wrote:

OK I aborted the install on my main rig as GTA 4 does not work worth a hoot on it. If I find a fix I will drop it on my desktop.

Normally the reason why I reformat and reinstall is because I add a piece of hardware so to dump all the crap I don't need (drives etc) I just backup and reinstall the OS. Instead of taking my time and cleaning up the registry.

Wouldn't having a data partition and an OS only partition make this easier?

I'll drop it now, but it just seems that if you reinstall your OS that often, having an OS partition would make backing up and reinstalling smoother/faster/overall easier. Plus you could try out a Hackintosh install, Linux distro, the Windows Beta, etc. and still have access to your data.

Also, Windows 7 Beta isn't perfect. I'm having issues with internet connectivity, and to install a few patches I booted into Vista, where my wireless works fine, downloaded the patches manually, dropped them on a partition, and then booted into W7 to install them. That would have been a lot more annoying if I didn't have both.

So thusfar my problems with the beta are:

-Wireless card driver/connectivity problems
-Despite changing the setting to shutdown when I hit the power button, it still puts the system to sleep
-I cannot install my preferred antivirus package, even when I choose to run the installer in compatibility mode
-The beta makes me wish I could use it as my main work OS, but the tech team would probably then literally crap themselves

It's a surprisingly small and harmless list of flaws.

I had connectivity issues as well. I had to go into the device manager and set it to not allow windows to shut it down in sleep mode. This was not an option in the power settings section and should be.

This weekend started as my attempt to update my rig with some new parts (quad-core phenom, 4GB) to Ubuntu, and ended as a full-blown primary-os trial of Windows 7. You see, I still have an IDE (old-skool style) RAID card, on which I have two drives in RAID 1. This works great as an archive of music, etc. Before anyone starts in, no, it's NOT a backup solution. It's a preservation solution :). Anyway, I've been running XP for years and decided that I would run Ubuntu on this new rig with XP in a virtual machine. That way, I can take advantage of all 4 GB of RAM and still run windows in a wife-friendly setup. Long story short, the linux drivers for my RocketRaid card are hideously out-of-date, with only a SUSE and Red Hat (yes, this was prior to the desktop switch to Fedora) packages. Compiling from source didn't go well, as my quasi-noob status prevented me from finding the necessary dependencies. Out of options, I decided to try the beta. It's free until August, so I'll consider this a test drive until then, right?

Much as I hate to say it, I'm thoroughly impressed so far. It's pretty zippy, and it "just works." The only driver I had to install was the RAID card one, whose Vista driver worked like a charm. Everything else works perfectly from the get-go. I also have Windows Media Center to use with my Xbox 360 now too. As an aside, I see the potential in this, but my Xbox keeps losing connection to the media center and has to re-connect every couple minutes. I'll have to see what i can do about that.

Anyway, it's fine for me to use this as my primary, as I'll have no problem wiping and re-installing the real deal on my WD Raptor primary drive when the time comes.

Is the card unsupported in Linux itself? Usually, when drivers like that go out of date, it's because they've been pulled into the kernel tree and aren't needed anymore.

If you like Win7, cool, but I'm really surprised that your RAID card didn't work with Ubuntu. Maybe you just need the 'alternate install' CD, which comes with a ton of wacky drivers for weird stuff.

unntrlaffinity wrote:
Pharacon wrote:

OK I aborted the install on my main rig as GTA 4 does not work worth a hoot on it. If I find a fix I will drop it on my desktop.

Normally the reason why I reformat and reinstall is because I add a piece of hardware so to dump all the crap I don't need (drives etc) I just backup and reinstall the OS. Instead of taking my time and cleaning up the registry.

Wouldn't having a data partition and an OS only partition make this easier?

I'll drop it now, but it just seems that if you reinstall your OS that often, having an OS partition would make backing up and reinstalling smoother/faster/overall easier. Plus you could try out a Hackintosh install, Linux distro, the Windows Beta, etc. and still have access to your data.

Also, Windows 7 Beta isn't perfect. I'm having issues with internet connectivity, and to install a few patches I booted into Vista, where my wireless works fine, downloaded the patches manually, dropped them on a partition, and then booted into W7 to install them. That would have been a lot more annoying if I didn't have both.

So thusfar my problems with the beta are:

-Wireless card driver/connectivity problems
-Despite changing the setting to shutdown when I hit the power button, it still puts the system to sleep
-I cannot install my preferred antivirus package, even when I choose to run the installer in compatibility mode
-The beta makes me wish I could use it as my main work OS, but the tech team would probably then literally crap themselves

It's a surprisingly small and harmless list of flaws.

I have no extra room on my HDD to put another partition on. I chopped up my HDD so much that I can not drop anything to make room. :\ I did think about it but we will see, I keep finding people where it works and some people that it doesn't we will see.

AP Erebus wrote:

My problem is that i've installed all my games onto a seperate data HDD (as well as steam) so to run them, i need to reinstall/get the registry values into the registry...

With steam all you have to do is copy your steam directory and copy onto your new setup. Then install steam to the same directory. All your games will be there without the need to redownload them.

I'll probably give win 7 a try. I decided to buy a new harddrive and trayless swap drive. I was planning of putting XP on it and using it for everything that doesn't work in vista. Well I was thinking of scraping vista altogether really and keeping the old drive as backup. I guess this is a perfect time to try a new OS.

I got Windows 7 installed last Wednesday and I had plenty of time to test all my games and TVersity (which I started using like a week ago). So far I'm very impressed and I'm a fan of the new task bar and windows management tools.

Overall, the system feels a lot snappier than Vista. I'm not sure if Windows 7 is just faster overall or if it is just because I got a fresh install going on. So far I've got no crashes and all my drivers and games are working perfectly.

I'm keeping Windows 7 as my primary OS for now if things keep going well like this.

I pulled apart my 500GB XP partition into it's two 250GB disks once more and am dual booting XP and Win7. So far it's running very smoothly, in fact I've barely been in XP since I installed 7. Went for the 64bit option so add some danger to proceedings, but so far my aged AMD 64 3700+ is holding up to the task. If anything normal Windows use is fresher then even in XP, though that could be becuase I haven't rebuilt my old XP image in a while (read more than 6 months, which is a lot for me!) Even gave Half-Life 2 Lost Coast a run out and didn't notice the performance of my X1900XT 512MB card suffereing any.. although to be fair it's probably restricted by my CPU rather than the GFX card.
So basically so far so good. Will keep throwing apps at it and see if i run into any probs. Been testing it with GOG.com games this evening, Lure ran just fine and the Adobe Air kit sees to have no issues. This is very stable for a beta, which I can only presume shows just how close this thing is to Vista with SP1 ..

Has anyone tried this on an older machine that is single core?

I've discovered one problem with Win7 so far. My ...liberated... copy of Office 2003 isn't very stable. On my account, it runs and crashes sometimes. On another account, it no office program will start at all. Who knows, they very well could be crashing it on purpose.

baggachipz wrote:

I've discovered one problem with Win7 so far. My ...liberated... copy of Office 2003 isn't very stable. On my account, it runs and crashes sometimes. On another account, it no office program will start at all. Who knows, they very well could be crashing it on purpose.

I've seen this on the forums, but I've been using legit versions and no problems thusfar. Have you tried running it in compatibility mode?

Also, I've started using a different router, and I can connect to the internet just fine. So I don't know if W7 just can't connect to certain routers or what.

Since a hard drive crash has made me reformat again, I think I'll give Win 7 a try on my gaming rig. I always have OSX as a backup if it doesn't work out.

Office 2007 seems to work just fine, so meh.

I've had no connectivity problems; if anything, it's better. uTorrent doesn't trash up other online activities like browsing like it did on XP.

I would like to stress again if anyone's having trouble running a particular program that used to work in XP or Vista, right-click the program and "Troubleshoot compatibility". Selecting that it either used to run well in Vista or XP, or requires more permissions, or both, seems to have solved nearly every problem I've had (my copy of Norton still won't install. Legit copy. AVG is running smoothly after troubleshooting the compatibility.)

The W7 connectivity problems seem to arise when trying to connect to various random hotspots. Some work, some don't, requiring me to boot into Vista if I need to be online.

Edwin wrote:

Has anyone tried this on an older machine that is single core?

I'm up and running fine on my single core (939 socket) AMD 64 3700+ which was a 2.2Ghz stock processor, though I have it OC'd to 2.75Ghz. 2 Gig of DDR too.

meh this kinda sucks. I was definitely in the market for a new desktop but theres no way I'm going to buy/build with another OS on the horizon especially one that is better then Vista.

Any advice what might be the best course of action then? From what I've skimmed the voucher option will only cover certain desktops sold much later? and since you cant pay to upgrade beta to the full version I just couldn't ride this beta to release? bleh.