Windows 7

[suryad]

My retail copy was installed last night

Installed a few updates and has not given me any problems

It's the 64bit Ultimate edition

Hmm I didnt know they were out already! x64 is where its at. I am most likely not spending the moolah for an ultimate ediition...the business edition will do fine for me and I will vlite it as well.

 

[pjbliverpool]

Mine comes at the end of October. Hmm, thats gonna put serious pressure on me to upgrade!

 

[almighty]

 

[tongue_of_colicab]

How big of a deal is having 2gb of ram vs 4gb of ram with Win7? I managed to activate my MSDN account so I got a free win7 pro copy but I only got 2gb of ram. Now 2gb extra is only 45 euro's but I'm a poor student so I rather dont spend the money if I dont have to. XP always worked fine for me with 2gigs, even in games etc.

 

[nutball]

My copy arrived yesterday morning - the pre-orders in the UK are being shipped early on account of the monthly postal workers strike falling on the 22nd this month.

 

[Albuquerque]

How big of a deal is having 2gb of ram vs 4gb of ram with Win7?

Given equal hardware stats between a Vista machine and a Win7 machine, the Win7 machine will perform better. Since 2GB even on Vista was entirely reasonable, Win7 will should have no problems at all.

 

[Blazkowicz]

Vista performs fast on any new hardware. Except if bogged down by hard disk I/O, I've seen it choke on a laptop drive when doing automatical hard disk grinding.

 

[Richard]

How big of a deal is having 2gb of ram vs 4gb of ram with Win7? I managed to activate my MSDN account so I got a free win7 pro copy but I only got 2gb of ram. Now 2gb extra is only 45 euro's but I'm a poor student so I rather dont spend the money if I dont have to. XP always worked fine for me with 2gigs, even in games etc.

With that ram price I assume you're talking about a desktop machine. In that case don't bother unless you want DX10+. It runs fine but you'll notice a speed-down in some scenarios.

For notebooks and if you have more than one machine, running Win7 can bring improvements but otherwise stick with what you have. I have a C2D + 2gb ram + DX9 card which had a custom version of XP I created to be as fast as possible but because I have a notebook and wanted to enjoy the HomeGroup connex I upgraded my desktop.

So, end result, it runs fine with just 2gb ram but I'd look harder at what Win7 features you want before upgrading.

 

[tongue_of_colicab]

I dont want dx10, but I got a dx10 card so little choice there if I install 7. Well I'll just give it a try and see how it goes. I wont be installing on the same drive as my current XP install anyway (and thank god, this old maxtor IDE disk isnt exactly the fastest thing) so if I dont like it or Win7 doesnt want to play nice with all my hardware (i'm particulairy interrested in how much of a drama my asus mainbord wifi is going to be) I can just pop the other disk back in.

 

[hoom]

On the Wifi front, I've had 2 official Netgear x64 drivers installed from Windows Update on W7 RC.

Netgear has been a long standing x64 naysayer but it looks like MS has finally put some pressure into them & I'm assuming that at least the first will be on the disks.

I'm still pissed that Home Premium has 16GB RAM limit
Feature wise, the only thing that draws me to Pro is that.

If the limit had been say 32GB, I'd be happy to go for Home Premium but I'm just a bit tetchy on that 16GB limit because of the tendency to double RAM every few years.

This PC is a few years old & I've gone from 2 -> 4GB.
Next PC is likely to start with 8 & double to 16GB so I'd be expecting to run up against that limit fairly quickly.

 

[Kaotik]

http://i408.photobucket.com/albums/pp166/almighty151986/Untitled-1.jpg

I heavily suggest setting the superbar to left edge instead of bottom on widescreen monitors, once you get used to it you'll wonder why it hasn't always been there.

 

[flynn]

I heavily suggest setting the superbar to left edge instead of bottom on widescreen monitors, once you get used to it you'll wonder why it hasn't always been there.

That looks suspiciously like NeXTSTEP's dock, vintage 1989

 

[Kaotik]

fixed the link to real size image.
yeah, it looks a lot like NeXTSTEPs dock, but hey, it works

 

[Arwin]

Signed up for the free upgrade thing, which means I"ll get a box in at the earliest 2 weeks + 7-10 days shipping, so I assume December is the earliest I should expect to see it arrive.

Unfortunately it means I'll be staying on 32bits for now, but oh well.

 

[Remi]

I heavily suggest setting the superbar to left edge instead of bottom on widescreen monitors, once you get used to it you'll wonder why it hasn't always been there.

+1 !

 

[tongue_of_colicab]

-1 for me. I hate the whole pin system. Took me about 30 seconds to put back the quick launch bar wich just works a million times better imo.

Also, does anyone know how you can disable the taskbar thumbs? I tried changing the gp settings but that doesnt seem to work.

Also, is there any way to change the explorer left hand side screen? I dont need stuff like favorites, homegroups etc. Only want a desktop shortcut and my hdd's, the rest is just useless.

 

[V3]

This PC is a few years old & I've gone from 2 -> 4GB.
Next PC is likely to start with 8 & double to 16GB so I'd be expecting to run up against that limit fairly quickly.

Are 4GB DDR3 stick widely available yet ? I've been waiting and waiting now Win 7 is out, 4GB DDR3 are still rare and probably expensive.

I think it'll be awhile before the average home PC exceed 16 GB. Probably next Windows will be out by then.

 

[Richard]

-1 for me. I hate the whole pin system. Took me about 30 seconds to put back the quick launch bar wich just works a million times better imo.

I much prefer the new superbar. Try it for a week. Soon enough you'll only use the windows menu for searching and shutting down the PC.

Also, does anyone know how you can disable the taskbar thumbs? I tried changing the gp settings but that doesnt seem to work.

IIRC Windows 7 Starter Edition doesn't have them but a cursory search didn't show up any solutions for disabling it in other editions.

Also, is there any way to change the explorer left hand side screen? I dont need stuff like favorites, homegroups etc. Only want a desktop shortcut and my hdd's, the rest is just useless.

You can put your own shortcuts (your HDDs) there if you want but as for removing the other stuff you can't. To ease into it, go into Folder Options and disable "Show all folders" and "Automatically expand to current folder".

I also preferred Vista's way of doing this as it allowed you to hide everything except your custom shortcuts... oh well.

 

[Teasy]

What's the compatibility like with this OS?

 

[Kaotik]

What's the compatibility like with this OS?

Pretty much the same as on Vista, aka "everything works"
And if you have some ancient piece of software, there's the "xp mode" which is virtualpc with xp sp3 which is quite well integrated to the win7 itself (downloadable separately for free from MS, currently only RC available but it has already gone gold)