Microsoft Windows 7

Anyone one planning to be an early beta tester of Windows 7?

If Windows 7 is going to be anything like Vista then I believe I will just stay with XP. I have a friend who has Vista loaded on her laptop and it just takes forever to boot the computer. I would almost prefer a Mac over Vista if these were my only two choices. Maybe it was just the computers running Vista just didn't have enough power but I was not impressed at all.

According to the review Windows 7 will be about 20 percent faster and this is what really caught my eye but I'm not sure if I really believe it. Anyone have any experience and can share there thoughts?

The review linked also tells us how we can get Windows 7 free starting tomorrow. If anyone installs Windows 7 via the links provided in the review please share your experiences.


Windows 7 It's Vista done right.

http://www.stuff.co.nz/technology/digital-living/2385181/Windows-7-Its-Vista-done-right

Been using 7 as my primary mobile laptop OS for months now and I can say it works and it works well. Beta 1 easily could have been made to release but they are going to put a final spit polish on it and clear up the bugs before release. You can sign up today for RC1 (Release candidate) and I highly recommend doing so.

Lebkuecher said:

Anyone one planning to be an early beta tester of Windows 7?

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I was a Win7 beta tester. It wasn't bad for a beta, other than the initial UAC arrangement where it was possible for userland code to disable UAC itself without a challenge (now fixed).

Personally I'm not in a super hurry to change from Vista to 7, but if they shove a free copy of the shipping version of Win7 in my face, I'll eventually get around to it Otherwise, Vista's fine for now.

I have a friend who has Vista loaded on her laptop and it just takes forever to boot the computer.

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Laptops, and prebuilt systems aimed at home users, tend to have a lot of unnecessary utilities and nannyware installed. For example, the laptop maker might install a bunch of "helper" stuff intended to hold your hand through driver updates, stuff like that. If the slow boot-up is bothering her, she could start by uninstalling all the software she doesn't actually use, and see where she's at.

Also, if the system is equipped with 1GB or less of RAM, then at the prices RAM is at these days, she might as well set it up with at least 2GB.

I'm running Vista it boots up in seconds,I'm happy

I've got Win7 running on an older Dell D800 laptop with the 128 MB nVidia Go5650 video card. Everything is not only working fine. It's a testbed, but so far I'm happily surprised about at least these things:

- Overall, it's great.

- An old trackpad driver from 2006 is functioning with it. I want to double-check, but I believe that wouldn't even load under Vista. Win7 griped that it wasn't compatible, but it seems to work fine. The trackpad functioned without the driver but I couldn't turn off the tap-ability of the pad and some other tweaky features.

- Similar for the nVidia graphics driver for the Go5650 card. I think Vista accepted that but it's also working in Win7. Without this driver the display was seen as "generic" and would only run up to 1280 by whatever, instead of its native 1680x1050. There are still parts of Win7 that don't recognize the card though, such as the Windows/Aero rating score which sees the card as generic with 0 MB video RAM so it bonks the entire machine as a 1.0 for the Windows capability score.

- Lots of good things to say about non-admin accounts. Printing works great. I was going to see if a printer driver could be loaded by a non-admin, though I suspect that can't, but Google Earth asked if I should load for all users or just this one so I selected "only this user" and it works fine. Few installers are that savvy to ask, though. At least you should know that it's feasible for a non-admin to load an entire app and have it work. That's mighty cool, though it could have been been offered to prior Windows versions as well, it's good to know it not only works but now companies are feeling enough pressure to offer non-admin installs for real.

- The full-on "aero" graphics work just fine on my years-old laptop. The video card is pretty good for its time, though.

- I had my 6 yr-old load some online game "Wizard101.com" to see how that works. It loaded fine and works fine.

- I plugged in a Kensington trackball and in about 30 seconds, with no intrusive "found new hardware" messages it was detected and my son was using it for the Wizard101 game (which was already running when I plugged in the trackball for the first time).

- OpenOffice works great on it. For those who care. I do.

- Most MS apps work fine.

- MS OneCare won't recognize it, but my understanding is that's getting phased out anyway. Some of its features are built in now anyway.

- AVG Free works, but isn't reporting the virus status to Win7 in some format so Win7 says it doesn't know if it's virus free.

- User switching seems much slower than even with Vista.

- There's now an easy way to take a screenshot. However, once you snap the screenshot or portion of the screen you need to paste the image into something in order to print it. Luckily, there's Win7 Paint that'll accept it.

- No native .pdf reader. Just frustrating to me. Immediately after installing Win7 you're off to the Adobe site to get Reader. Seems to me that if the U.S. government is distributing their official docs such as tax documents and legal proceedings only in .pdf format that the most widely used OS in the U.S. by a huge margin should probably natively support .pdf. IMHO.

- I like the bigger icons on the taskbar.

- I hate the taskbar default of putting similar app windows above one icon on the tasbar. That's one more step for me to go through to get to another window.

Forgot to mention: This Win7 install is totally clean. I reformatted the drive then loaded only from the Win7 DVD and built up from there. Not an upgrade. I did try an upgrade and that functioned, but I didn't test it for long. Upgrade ability is not a priority for me.

binky said:

- No native .pdf reader. Just frustrating to me. Immediately after installing Win7 you're off to the Adobe site to get Reader. Seems to me that if the U.S. government is distributing their official docs such as tax documents and legal proceedings only in .pdf format that the most widely used OS in the U.S. by a huge margin should probably natively support .pdf. IMHO.

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Although the text is marginally fuzzier than Adobe's Reader, and I do mean marginally, I would skip the bloatware of Adobe and download Foxit instead. It's tiny and works well.

Basic Info:

http://www.foxitsoftware.com/pdf/reader/

Free Download (no strings attached):

http://www.foxitsoftware.com/pdf/reader/download.php

LEDAdd1ct said:

... download Foxit instead. It's tiny and works well. ...

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Thanks! :thumbsup:

Lebkuecher said:

If Windows 7 is going to be anything like Vista then I believe I will just stay with XP.

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For some backward capability you are going to get VirtualPC with Windows 7 Pro, Ultimate, and Enterprise, and rumored to come with an XP SP3 license. Seems unlikely to won't work for games because of the usual VM graphics hit. The VirtualPC requires that the processor be newer and support virtualization technology. I'm testing it this morning and if I can get it to work I'll report back.

I run vista business now on an HP business laptop. The original 1 Gb ram was not enough, but the 4 gb ram is fine. I didn't test anything in between. In general, I am very happy with it. I do use the one-care program just to get some tasks off my plate - it is pretty good actually.

As far as Win7 - There is nothing really driving me to do it, but I am not against it either. We already have laptops in the house with XP, Vista, and 2 versions of Mac OS - all seem about the same to me in terms of real world use.

The main difference is if you like the user interface on one vs another - and I just don't like the mac interface, while my kids like it. I guess the other difference is that some devices have limited drivers for mac, but we get around it.

I wonder how many daily security downloads will come with it?

Lebkuecher said:

Windows 7 It's Vista done right.

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ME was supposed to be 98SE done right.
XP was supposed to be ME done right.
Vista was supposed to be XP done right.
Now Win7 is supposed to be Vista done right.

The way I see it, this merely means that M$ is incapable of releasing an operating system done right.

Fallingwater said:

ME was supposed to be 98SE done right.
XP was supposed to be ME done right.
Vista was supposed to be XP done right.
Now Win7 is supposed to be Vista done right.

The way I see it, this merely means that M$ is incapable of releasing an operating system done right.

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:twothumbs

You know, it almost seems like if you skip one version of Windows, you'd be OK...

Win98SE was OK
ME sucked
XP is OK
Vista sux
Win7 (sounds OK... so far)

I see a pattern here...

My take:

Win98 SE was OK for what it was.

WinME was yucky.

Win2000 Pro was a bona fide classic.

At first, WinXP was a dressed-up remake of Win2000, and regrettably had a cut-down version (XP Home) as well as a full-function version that rivaled Win2000 Pro (meaning, XP Professional Edition).

When WinXP SP2 arrived, it finally made sense to upgrade from Win2000 Pro to WinXP Pro SP2, thanks to the SP2 security makeover that actually delivered some compelling reasons to use XP.

Vista managed the paradigm shift of transparently running my programs and user session at non-Admin level without breaking most software. IMHO that's the main story with Vista, not the 3D-accelerated GUI and blah blah etc. It's a watershed in Windows history, and since people generally don't like change, it has its detractors. Vista also touched off the migration to 64-bit versions of Windows in earnest, unlike the OEM-only WinXP Pro x64 Edition that never made much headway.

Win7 appears to me to be a "Vista SE" at this point. And that's not necessarily a bad thing, but unless I have a pressing need to input handwritten text on my coffee table or something... :thinking: yeah. I'll be OK with Vista for now.

I may try it eventually but for now Linux does so much more than Vista ever did for me on this laptop.

Lebkuecher said:

According to the review Windows 7 will be about 20 percent faster and this is what really caught my eye but I'm not sure if I really believe it. Anyone have any experience and can share there thoughts?

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I've been dual-booting Windows 7 32-bit next to Arch Linux 64-bit since a week or so after the beta started.

I don't see how they figure some % faster, given that most applications run about the same speed as they did in Win2k. *shrug* Not that it's not snappier than Vista, or less of a RAM hog, but...

If you hated Vista, but liked Windows 2k/XP, then Windows 7 will be for you.

Windows 7 won't get me out of my Compiz Arch64 desktop (no DE, no fancy animation plugins turned on), or Openbox Arch32 notebook (er, and Win2k on said notebook); but I'll probably buy it, and get back into Windows gaming.

Windows 7 sounds like an improvement, but I don't think Microsoft is going to let you have your computer back any time soon.

NA8 said:

Windows 7 sounds like an improvement, but I don't think Microsoft is going to let you have your computer back any time soon.

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I think there is more truth in this statement than meets the eye. All the way from CPM and Dos 1 up until Win XP, I had the illusion at least that I more or less understood what my computer was doing and why. I admit, with XP, it was getting tougher to follow.

With Vista, even when I turn off a lot of features, I still was not in control. I finally had to submit to "trusting" MS and HP - or not using it. This is a big mental step to accept, but I didn't really have a choice.

Linux I can follow along, but mac os (for me) is even worse than Vista. Going down that path really makes you drink the kool aid, and 1/ 2 the time I could not even figure out how to find a document or properly file it.

Reality is - almost no one is in control of their laptop any more, so I bit the big bullet and even hired MS with one care service. I have to admit that it works, despite my reservations. The pros will crack my security anyway, so which is better - MS reading my computer, or the Chinese ? I guess I trust MS more.

HarryN said:

Reality is - almost no one is in control of their laptop any more, so I bit the big bullet and even hired MS with one care service. I have to admit that it works, despite my reservations. The pros will crack my security anyway, so which is better - MS reading my computer, or the Chinese ? I guess I trust MS more.

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I've had very good results with OneCare helping many otherwise unmanaged computers stay relatively healthy. It's scheduled to be discontinued in June, so I guess that's why MS didn't bother making it work with Win7. Something code-named "Morro" will be the next solution and according to MS will be a free anti-malware solution. I can't imagine how that sits with Symantec et al, so I can only imagine that it'll be crippled somehow, requiring purchase of a 3rd party antivirus app to supplement it? I don't know and haven't researched it. I'm sure someone else here can fill us in on the Windows 7 antivirus plan.

HarryN said:

Linux I can follow along, but mac os (for me) is even worse than Vista. Going down that path really makes you drink the kool aid, and 1/ 2 the time I could not even figure out how to find a document or properly file it.

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Funny. For me, it was a tremendous relief to switch to Mac OS X. I feel I have much more control than on all Windows versions, and there are way better tools to organize and find my data (Hallowed be the Spotlight). Vista and Windows 7 are much worse in this regard, and offer tools that look good on paper, but in everyday use just give confusion (like folder displaying options that work fine on pure video, or music folders ... don't ever mix'n'match folders, say, by projects that require video AND music source files!).

As for Windows 7, I can't say that it's much less of a resource-hog than Vista. The RC1 takes much less harddrive space, though. It also runs fine on 512 MB RAM in my virtual machine, which is how I run Windows nowadays exclusively. However, whenever I run Windows-7-VM, the processor load goes through the roof, and the fan speed maxes out to get rid of the extra heat Win7 produces. XP SP3 and Linux in a VM let me do the same stuff with pretty much not much extra load, and the fan goes down to normal, quiet levels after the initial boot power spike. Considering that I pretty much only need Windows for a handful of specialized IE webpages, DRMed video playback and a bit of AutoCAD, why should I put up with the extra load of Win7 that's SIMPLY NOT THERE in XP? WTF is Win7 doing, anyway? I'm looking for whatever the extra processor load is doing, and I can't find what causes it, and I don't see ANY benefits from those intensive processes, AT ALL.

why should I put up with the extra load of Win7 that's SIMPLY NOT THERE in XP?

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Have a look at your Win7's Task Manager. Is it showing lots of processor load in Win7? Because it might just be your VM itself, not what's running inside of the VM, that's the problem. I haven't tried the Win7 RC yet, but the beta certainly didn't cause high CPU load on a real computer.

If Win7 itself does actually show high CPU load, you can investigate using the Resource Monitor found on the Performance Tab.