Windows 7 RTM

I used Windows 7 throughout the beta, and it was pretty nifty. Now that Windows 7 Professional is available for free on my school's MSDNaa account, I have it both on my netbook and desktop. Gotta say, it's pretty solid for the initial product. It's nothing like Vista where it started off being absolutely atrocious.

What I enjoy most about it would be the memory management and footprint. Vista Business produced a 750MB footprint after booting up Vista with several gadgets on my netbook. With Windows 7, the footprint fell to 540MB. It took loading Trillian, Skype, Steam, and Firefox to get it remotely close to the 750MB footprint Vista had.

Newer machines won't see much of a difference in speed compared to Vista. Perhaps there will be a difference when they release DirectX 11 with DirectCompute capabilities.

Have any of you fiddled with Windows 7? If so, what did you think of it? Will you install it when it becomes available October 24th, or are you a student that already has their hands on it?

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The X
"God help us. We're in the hands of engineers."
- Dr. Ian Malcolm, Jurassic Park

Nice - I haven't yet, as my current only computer (a laptop) can't even run Vista, but a few days ago I ordered a beast of a computer (Intel Core i7, 6GB of RAM, etc) - and Windows 7.

I'm expecting it to make me go all Surprised

and

and also

and maybe

but definately Cool

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Proud member of the Licorice Whips!

Explain to me, what were the "atrocious" problems that people had with Vista? I'm curious. I could Google it but I'd rather hear from you guys what was so bad about Vista.

Stability and performance is what really threw Vista off from the get go. It's expected that the release of the first version will always come with problems, but it seemed escalated through Vista because the OS was rushed. It's a memory hog compared to XP, taking up approximately 750MB after startup on my netbook. Early gaming performance wasn't on par with XP's foundation. The extra overhead included with the OS lagged the system in general. The advantage of XP was that it could still run some native 16-bit programs. Vista cannot, and a lot of businesses still use 16-bit programs. That's why a lot of businesses have decided to stick with XP until Windows 7 comes out, where it now has a Windows XP Virtualization feature.

Lots of stability and a few performance issues were covered in the first service pack, and even more so in SP2. I've used Vista since SP1, and I've never had a problem with it. If you can deal with a little less memory available, it's pretty solid. Before SP1, it was always more troublesome to use the system than beneficial.

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The X
"God help us. We're in the hands of engineers."
- Dr. Ian Malcolm, Jurassic Park

The only real issue I have with vista is that is doesn't talk to xp. since I have an XP desktop that is linked to all my 'stationary' equipment like scanners and printers, that pushes it into the #fail category for me. I'm looking forward to Win7

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It wouldn't hurt you to think like a serial killer once in a while.

yeah, I had to buy an external HD to transfer all the information I had off my old desktop when I bought the lappy. (and then, of course, aside from a couple music playlists, everything just stayed on the external.) Not wanting to talk to XP was a pretty big turn off for me, too.

that memory footprint thing explains quite a bit about my troubles as well... I don't have a whole lot installed (I don't think anyway) but it still takes a minute or so to fully boot up. I remember having faster boot times on Windows 2000... or so it seemed.

I get the feeling that there's a lot of developers who think that they need to use the memory if it's available... I mean, the average home computer has exponentially greater levels of memory than the rockets that got sent to the moon... consider that! we're using as much computing power to play solitaire as it took to get into SPACE.

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Welcome to my International House of Roffles. I'm wafna, your intar-web philosomapher.

Lurk? lurk lurk! Lurk lurk lurk!

I've basically decided I want to get Windows 7. Just for the s**t of it. I don't want to do dual boot as that's a lot of work and my hard drive already has 2 partitions on it.

Basically, what I want to do is just put Windows 7 in place of XP, which I'm pretty sure I can do.

My hard drive has 2 partitions. One is C:, which is where Windows XP is installed. The other is D:, which has all my important data (including games). So basically I already backed my system up. However, what I want to know is if I can even do this without consequence. If I were to just clear out the C: partition and install Windows 7 on it, would I still be able to access the D: partition without any issues? Or would I have to reformat that partition to so Windows 7 could interact with it? I have reinstalled Windows XP on C: before without having to do anything to D:, but that's probably because I made both partitions when installing XP the first time...

Anyway, any info would be appreciated.

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externe festplatte

BruceSmith wrote:

I've basically decided I want to get Windows 7. Just for the s**t of it. I don't want to do dual boot as that's a lot of work and my hard drive already has 2 partitions on it.

Basically, what I want to do is just put Windows 7 in place of XP, which I'm pretty sure I can do.

My hard drive has 2 partitions. One is C:, which is where Windows XP is installed. The other is D:, which has all my important data (including games). So basically I already backed my system up. However, what I want to know is if I can even do this without consequence. If I were to just clear out the C: partition and install Windows 7 on it, would I still be able to access the D: partition without any issues? Or would I have to reformat that partition to so Windows 7 could interact with it? I have reinstalled Windows XP on C: before without having to do anything to D:, but that's probably because I made both partitions when installing XP the first time...

Anyway, any info would be appreciated.

As long as the C: drive is at the beginning of the drive, Windows 7 should install just fine. It will clear your XP install, as upgrades are only possible with Vista installs. The D: drive will not be affected, and since it was a partition created in XP (and hence either FAT or NTFS), it will be perfectly readable after the installation.

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The X
"God help us. We're in the hands of engineers."
- Dr. Ian Malcolm, Jurassic Park

I wouldn't mind having windows 7, but it just seems so expensive. I haven't paid for a windows OS since windows 95. If then. SO I don't have a legitimate copy of windows for an upgrade, and that's the only version of 7 I've seen in stores. And I don't even wanna know how much a clean install of windows 7 is gonna cost.

So come on, Venis Boards, hook me up with a deal.

I saw this thing about getting it for 30 bucks, if you're a student. But I'm not a student anymore. Crying or Very sad

Forgive me if this sounds kinda incoherent, I've got a cold, not thinking too straight.

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If you can't trust Ed, then who can you trust? Did you miss me?

Normally, I would comply with requests for free software, but I've unfortunately used up my two copies of Windows 7 (x86 and x64) to upgrade my netbook and desktop.

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The X
"God help us. We're in the hands of engineers."
- Dr. Ian Malcolm, Jurassic Park