Windows 7

[Sxotty]

I think they really were caught by surprise by how many people wanted it.

Guess Vista really is that bad for some people.

Anyway, not a single issue (other than Chrome not working) so far, my PC has been unstable recently on Vista x64 but hasn't gone off once yet.

I wanted it badly and Vista is great for me. I think it may be people on XP who wanted to skip Vista, or other things. One issue for me is I have Vista X32, and I kind of wanted to try x64 (which I have on my laptop) on my desktop, that makes it riskier I suppose though since I cannot run x64 in x32 VM or whatever. I will probably just give it a go though as my primary in a week or so and leave it until August baring unforeseen total catastrophic issues.

I think I will just purchase a new internal drive and install onto that leaving my other drives disconnected to see how it plays out.

 

[eastmen]

I"m having trouble with my 3870x2 . The drivers weren't wanting to install and now direct draw and some other thigs are disable and i can't figure out how to enable it. Even nero tells me that acceleration is turned off.

anyone have any ideas ?

 

[INKster]

I've had no real trouble until now (running 7 x64 on an Intel E5200, 4GB DDR2, 6800 GT + FW 181.20), but it seems to have some visible minor issues:
Font scaling is somewhat screwed up in (both FF3 and IE8), with large portions of the same web pages displaying large fonts where there shouldn't be any, and small fonts where they should have been bigger, alternatively.

The second is somewhat more puzzling, but i think the mainboard (Asus P5B-Deluxe WiFi/AP, with the latest 1236 BIOS) and RAM configuration are the culprits.
You see, the 4GB are arranged in a 4x 1GB fashion, with one stick of each brand per channel (two pairs, one from Transcend, the other from Infineon, all at SPD timings).
Now, if i leave the "memory remap" feature enabled in the BIOS, all the native windows apps detect the 4GB, but then i have the occasional long slowdown/freeze, where even Ctrl+Alt+Del doesn't work for up to a full minute.
If i leave it disabled, then Win7 x64 will detect 4GB on the performance rating screen, but the system info (Start->Search: "System Information") will report 4GB of "Physical Memory" installed, but only 3GB of "Total Physical Memory", as does "Task Manager".
CPU-Z 1.49 detects the correct amount at 4GB. Running on Dual-Channel DDR2-800.

Windows Bug or BIOS limitation ? I know this motherboard supports up to 8GB, so, I'm at a loss about it.

Other than that, it's running beautifully so far.
The major difference ? No more hard drive "scratching", a constant hell of mine whether i run 2, 3, 4GB RAM systems, one or more fast hard drives, 32bit or 64bit versions of Vista, etc.

 

[Sxotty]

The second is somewhat more puzzling, but i think the mainboard (Asus P5B-Deluxe WiFi/AP, with the latest 1236 BIOS) and RAM configuration are the culprits.
You see, the 4GB are arranged in a 4x 1GB fashion, with one stick of each brand per channel (two pairs, one from Transcend, the other from Infineon, all at SPD timings).
Now, if i leave the "memory remap" feature enabled in the BIOS, all the native windows apps detect the 4GB, but then i have the occasional long slowdown/freeze, where even Ctrl+Alt+Del doesn't work for up to a full minute.
If i leave it disabled, then Win7 x64 will detect 4GB on the performance rating screen, but the system info (Start->Search: "System Information") will report 4GB of "Physical Memory" installed, but only 3GB of "Total Physical Memory", as does "Task Manager".
CPU-Z 1.49 detects the correct amount at 4GB. Running on Dual-Channel DDR2-800.

Windows Bug or BIOS limitation ? I know this motherboard supports up to 8GB, so, I'm at a loss about it.

Other than that, it's running beautifully so far.
The major difference ? No more hard drive "scratching", a constant hell of mine whether i run 2, 3, 4GB RAM systems, one or more fast hard drives, 32bit or 64bit versions of Vista, etc.

Vista actually does something similar to me, but I have x32 (and a asus P5b something or other the micro atx board) with 4GB ram. It is one of the reasons I wanted to try x64

 

[pjbliverpool]

The major difference ? No more hard drive "scratching", a constant hell of mine whether i run 2, 3, 4GB RAM systems, one or more fast hard drives, 32bit or 64bit versions of Vista, etc.

Thankyou God!! This was the one, huge, major flaw of Vista for me. Its mainly due to superfetch (at least for me) which I turned off, but recently had to turn back on to resolve texture bugs in GTA4.

I can't fricken stand it! Looking forward to Windows 7 now almost as much as I looked forward to Vista.

 

[Riptides]

*backed up everything first.
**understand it's beta.

I went ahead and did a Vista Ultimate x64 SP1 to Windows 7 x64 Upgrade, not clean install.

Now I'm getting an issue where Catalyst Control Center is not only not starting but I cannot uninstall CCC nor overwrite the ATi drivers using the Win7 Beta drivers.

When trying to overwrite the Installer package hangs on "enumerating source media for installable packages".

Trying to uinstall causes the package to hang on populating the uninstall list.

Safe mode is no help, anyone else having this issue?
Any feasible workarounds?

 

[Betanumerical]

Is swear to god the framerate in supcom in windows 7 is more stable and has less drops then Vista. it could be that windows 7 is a clean install.. i swear im not seeing things.

 

[INKster]

Is swear to god the framerate in supcom in windows 7 is more stable and has less drops then Vista. it could be that windows 7 is a clean install.. i swear im not seeing things.

Yeah, and it's not only in games.
Things like Nvidia's Control Panel, Windows Live Messenger 9 Beta, all those little Windows Built-in apps, copy/paste operations, etc, seem to launch much faster and/or fluidly (by that, i mean, less UAC-constricted by default) than in Vista.

Another thing is that where previously i would just ignore the taskbar thumbnails as a stupid cosmetic gimmick, i now find myself using them constantly in Win7, because of their ability to single-out individual windows and tabs (sadly, Firefox 3.xx still doesn't implement that feature when tabbed, but it works in everything else i've tested it with), custom "mini-controls", jump lists, etc.

It "feels" like a complete product experience, not as a Windows XP with a new shiny interface and burdened with immature new API's and security procedures like Vista did.

 

[Kaotik]

So wait, they remove the 2.5 million limit?

Yes they did, there's now 10 keys, 5 for 32bit and 5 for 64bit (though 32bit keys work on 64bit and 64bit keys work on 32bit too) they're giving out for everyone, and they've obviously removed any activation limitations on those keys.

 

[Betanumerical]

more random peformance stuff.

Vista copying from network storage -> desktop. ~6.2 - 7.0MB/s

Win7 copying from network storage -> desktop. ~10.0 - 11.0MB/s

Thats a rather large gap.

 

[suryad]

Thankyou God!! This was the one, huge, major flaw of Vista for me. Its mainly due to superfetch (at least for me) which I turned off, but recently had to turn back on to resolve texture bugs in GTA4.

I can't fricken stand it! Looking forward to Windows 7 now almost as much as I looked forward to Vista.

Indexing service and texture bugs? Wow never thought they could be related!

And its very reassuring to hear about all these performance improvements. I just hope MS doesnt botch it by the time it comes to releasing the OS.

 

[Davros]

Is the hdd thrashing really gone it drives me mad on peoples pc's i fix indexing service turned off (as much as you can) people say its because of superfetch but they only have at most 1gb of ram so it cant be putting that much data into free memory

 

[Rodéric]

I like it, it's a nice improvement over Windows Vista x64, new UI is interesting, I'll see how long it takes before I get used/take advantage of it.

Obviously Creative Labs has not released XFi drivers for 7 and the Vista one say that I should upgrade to an OS more recent like XP or better... yeah sure

 

[Kaotik]

I like it, it's a nice improvement over Windows Vista x64, new UI is interesting, I'll see how long it takes before I get used/take advantage of it.

Obviously Creative Labs has not released XFi drivers for 7 and the Vista one say that I should upgrade to an OS more recent like XP or better... yeah sure

Try installing the Vista drivers in Vista compatibility mode, it apparently DOES fool any program into thinking it really is Vista it's running on.
This has been used succesfully on many drivers by many users.

 

[DJ12]

it could be that windows 7 is a clean install..

I don't think so. Remeber the zdnet article where he lists XP, Vista and 7 against each other, everything was faster on 7, you might be seeing an extra speed boost for a clean install, but it's still going to be faster even without it.

 

[Kaotik]

I don't think so. Remeber the zdnet article where he lists XP, Vista and 7 against each other, everything was faster on 7, you might be seeing an extra speed boost for a clean install, but it's still going to be faster even without it.

though the ZDNet article doesn't specify how big the differences are, it could be 0.00002sec faster than XP and 0.00001sec faster than Vista, and it would get 1, Vista 2 and XP 3 etc

 

[Scott_Arm]

damn

Well, my ancient PC just couldn't cut it. It actually seemed to run great, and pretty snappy on my old pc. Problem is, it wouldn't recognize my onboard networking, so it was pretty much useless to me.

It took me a while to find my way around. I'd never used Vista. I mean, obviously I could do it, but figuring out if I had a network device installed or not took longer than it should have. Some of the icons were not very illustrative to me. The network icon on the start/task bar didn't look like anything. There were a few other icons that looked unclear as well.

Overall, looked very nice, snappy and installed quickly. Its a shame I couldn't use it. I bet I'd have trouble with drivers in Vista as well.

 

[Ateo]

Well, my ancient PC just couldn't cut it. It actually seemed to run great, and pretty snappy on my old pc. Problem is, it wouldn't recognize my onboard networking, so it was pretty much useless to me.

It took me a while to find my way around. I'd never used Vista. I mean, obviously I could do it, but figuring out if I had a network device installed or not took longer than it should have. Some of the icons were not very illustrative to me. The network icon on the start/task bar didn't look like anything. There were a few other icons that looked unclear as well.

Overall, looked very nice, snappy and installed quickly. Its a shame I couldn't use it. I bet I'd have trouble with drivers in Vista as well.

Did you try and install the drivers in "Vista Compatible" mode?

 

[Scott_Arm]

Did you try and install the drivers in "Vista Compatible" mode?

Well, I only have one computer, so I couldn't get online to download any drivers

Looks like there aren't any vista drivers anyway.

 

[Kaotik]

Thankyou God!! This was the one, huge, major flaw of Vista for me. Its mainly due to superfetch (at least for me) which I turned off, but recently had to turn back on to resolve texture bugs in GTA4.

I can't fricken stand it! Looking forward to Windows 7 now almost as much as I looked forward to Vista.

You did what?
Turning superfetch off is one of the worst things you can do on Vista (or 7 for that matter)