Windows 7

[neliz]

I've had problems with Vista spontaneously disconnecting wireless or even turning it off completely (and it only eventually realises this after a reboot) or with it failing to notice that I've plugged in the LAN cable. It is really annoying.

What kind of machine? After software updates, the old 3945 worked reasonably well in XP and Vista, but for a full year there were loads of issues. Now intel has replaced that with the (WiFi Link) 5100 and it's a big piece of crap. I've seen it happen with me and others, the wireless just disables itself and vista thinks it's enabled.. flipping everything around has no success (enabling disables the hardware) I hope that the most recent drivers (that's august or october) give less issues.

 

[Grall]

Most likely the ssd thats causing your problem. If it doesn't have trim it will slow down as its used. That is if your using the ssd when the problems happened.

I have the SLC version of Intel's SSD, it suffers from less of these issues to begin with. And it was only during the OS bootup anyway, once the login screen appeared things went like greased lightning. Starting up all those services, 10+ systray icons (including bloated heavyweights like steam, skype and MSN messenger) and so on took only seconds. Launching a game like WoW too on top of all that took only a few seconds more as well to the title/login screen...

Back in my harddrive days, Vista took upwards of a minute before it settled down on bootup.

 

[Simon F]

What kind of machine? After software updates, the old 3945 worked reasonably well in XP and Vista, but for a full year there were loads of issues. Now intel has replaced that with the (WiFi Link) 5100 and it's a big piece of crap. I've seen it happen with me and others, the wireless just disables itself and vista thinks it's enabled.. flipping everything around has no success (enabling disables the hardware) I hope that the most recent drivers (that's august or october) give less issues.

I have a Toshiba Tecra, and that WiFi adapter sounds like the one it. Are the new drivers hosted somewhere on Intel's site?

I currently have turned off the save power option for the adapter and (so far) haven't had a repeat of the problem.

Now if I could get it recognise the LAN cable being plugged in without a reboot I'll be even happier.

 

[Scott_Arm]

I don't like the new start/taskbar. There is some weird behavior. Yesterday I went to the start menu and under "tasks" for Live Messenger and it listed, "Sign out," but I hadn't even signed in yet. Normally I go there and click "sign in." My Steam icon was being hidden in the task bar, so when I loaded Steam there was nothing to tell me it was still running. I had to tell it to stop hiding the Steam icon.

I do like the way you can preview and select windows from the task bar by hovering over the icon for the app you want.

 

[Richard]

I do like the way you can preview and select windows from the task bar by hovering over the icon for the app you want.

You can also close them by middle-clicking on their thumbnail.

 

[vazel]

Shit I did not know that. That's really convenient.

 

[Frank]

I just upgraded my main PC and installed W7U64, and while I loathe Vista, I'm quite happy with it so far. Nothing freaked me out yet (except for the apostrophe-space bit at the start, but that was easily fixed). I've got a handful of gripes, but I'm more than happy with the overall speed, compatibility and snappy responsiveness, especially when copying files around or running some major stuff in the background. And it was the first time I installed Windows while it recognized all devices and installed all the drivers out of the box.

I like it.

 

[neliz]

M$ announces 40 million copies of Win7 sold
http://www.microsoft.com/Presspass/press/2009/nov09/11-19Nov09ShareholderPR.mspx
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13860_3-10401449-56.html

"We've already sold twice as many units as any OS in a comparable time frame," Ballmer said. "Windows 7 is simply the best PC operating system that we or anyone else has ever built."

By last week, Windows 7 accounted for 4 percent of Web-accessing devices, according to Net Applications; it took Vista more than seven months to reach that level.

 

[Scott_Arm]

For some reason on the start bar it always shows the Dragon Age icon for all of my active steam windows. I can't figure out if there's a way to change that.

 

[Bludd]

By holding shift and right-clicking on something in Windows Explorer, you get some additional options like copy path and open command prompt. Does anyone know how this can be made to be the default right-click menu so that shift doesn't need to be held while doing it?

 

[Richard]

Btw, this isn't new to Windows 7. I don't know how to make the shift-context menu the default but you may want this.

 

[Frank]

Does anyone know how you can get it to resume from sleep? I googled, tried all suggestions I found, but none worked.

I have a Logitech wireless keyboard and a wired mouse (both USB) and I disabled turning off USB on sleep. I enabled S3 and wake up from mouse/keyboard in the BIOS. The power comes back on and the fans spin up when I press a button/key, but that's all.

I know it can take a while (like up to 5 mins on my XP laptop), but noting happens after that.

 

[Frank]

After yet another failed test, pulling the plug, turning it back on and seeing "Resuming", it gave me a blue screen.

I think that qualifies as: "Definitely broken".

 

[dZeus]

sounds like a driver issue. Time to debug the crashlog and see which driver is the cause?

 

[Richard]

After yet another failed test, pulling the plug, turning it back on and seeing "Resuming", it gave me a blue screen.

I think that qualifies as: "Definitely broken".

Drivers you mean? Sleep always worked for me in 7/Vista except when I tried some beta nVidia drivers or modded desktop drivers on my laptop. The symptom was the same: computer woke up, make HDD noises and stuff but screen stayed blank.

Btw, I don't know about XP but resuming from sleep in 7/Vista ought to only take a handful of seconds.

 

[Grall]

How can I move the hibernate file from one disk to another? Right now I got a hiberfile.sys on my 60GB SSD that's 9.4GB in size, and it's eating a significant piece of my drive's real estate.

Thankfully x64 Win7 doesn't take up nearly as much disk space as x64 Vista did. Vista's install was just crazy huge btw... I actually have more free diskspace under Win7 even with this hiberfile, which is considerably BIGGER than the one I had to turn off under vista since I have more RAM now than back then.

 

[neliz]

How can I move the hibernate file from one disk to another? Right now I got a hiberfile.sys on my 60GB SSD that's 9.4GB in size, and it's eating a significant piece of my drive's real estate.

you can't, hiberfil.sys needs to be on your system disk.

 

[Grall]

Blah, that sucks when it's possible to move other stuff like the pagefile etc... Guess I'll have to turn off hibernation then when I start to run low on disk space.

 

[neliz]

Blah, that sucks when it's possible to move other stuff like the pagefile etc... Guess I'll have to turn off hibernation then when I start to run low on disk space.

you CAN move your pagefile to another partition, but if you want to actually save your crashdumps you need a proper sized pagefile on your system disk.

 

[Frank]

sounds like a driver issue. Time to debug the crashlog and see which driver is the cause?

All the drivers installed are from the installation DVD or Windows update. Certified by MS.

Then again, XP was the first Windows that actually had a working sleep mode for me, if you didn't mind some fiddling to make it happen.