Windows 7

[JohnBoucher]

Originally Posted by jcatt

[Off Topic]
From the moment i first booted the laptop from the factory it ran slowly. Even after i uninstalled all the "junk-wear" that came pre-installed it still ran relatively slowly, and would often lock-up for minuets or just freeze completely. I had many BSOD's all with different causes, which made troubleshooting impossible. The boot up was slow, sometimes it would be 10 minutes before i could use it. I tried to improve performance by turning off most of the visual features and tweaked it as much as i could, but to little improvement.

The people that I know that have Vista running well have all reformatted and reinstalled Vista. Then Vista runs well.

[jcatt]

Originally Posted by JohnBoucher

The people that I know that have Vista running well have all reformatted and reinstalled Vista. Then Vista runs well.

That could be the case but i didn't have a standalone copy of vista to install, only the recovery partition built into the laptop. But i did have XP Tablet so i defaulted to that. Given the option again, even with the quirky drivers, i would still go back to XP.

[T3H_K3YM45T3R]

a guy that used to be on my team downloaded the beta via torrent and he likes it, he said it had some cool stuff and he was going to use it instead of vista. he gave me a copy of the ISO but I haven't had a chance to get it working yet because vista won't allow me to adjust my partitions enough to get it installed

[mrbob1000]

Originally Posted by T3H_K3YM45T3R

a guy that used to be on my team downloaded the beta via torrent and he likes it, he said it had some cool stuff and he was going to use it instead of vista. he gave me a copy of the ISO but I haven't had a chance to get it working yet because vista won't allow me to adjust my partitions enough to get it installed

I didnt touch my partitions at all, i just made a virtual machine in virtualbox (its free) it runs pretty well but would probably be faster if it was installed on my computer as opposed to a virtual machine.

[Michael_MARS]

Originally Posted by T3H_K3YM45T3R

a guy that used to be on my team downloaded the beta via torrent and he likes it, he said it had some cool stuff and he was going to use it instead of vista. he gave me a copy of the ISO but I haven't had a chance to get it working yet because vista won't allow me to adjust my partitions enough to get it installed

Were you using the partition manager in a window or in cmd? Because some times i can get things done in cmd that the normal wizards or programs don't let me do.... just a suggestion.

[kirtar]

Ok, so I just installed the beta and right now most of it works. By most I mean that the Internet fails. It seems that with my MSI Neos Platinum, the networking goes through an Nvidia nForce 3 that it doesn't work. Anybody know how to fix this? As far as I know, Nvidia has dropped support for nForce 3 even for Vista, so I can't find drivers or whatever to let me connect to the internet.

[MrForbes]

It looks like I'll be trying out beta 7 after all...my son wants to play with it, so we're downloading it to insall on one of the spare P4s. We need to juggle memory to come up with 1GB for it, though.

27%....should be done downloading by morning....

[McGurky]

they where originaly going to cap the downloads at about 2.5 million, but they changed it and made it unlimited downloads for 2 full weeks!! woot this means i don't have to rush to get it downloaded

[rdlevy1215]

I am running Windows 7 Ultimate Beta and can say for sure that i will not be going back to Vista or XP. This will be here as my regular day-to-day OS since everything works with it and it runs like XP on the machine that i'm using it with (Pentium D 3.4Ghz, 2GB RAM, NVIDIA 7350LE). This machine came with XP (With Vista Express Upgrade) and then i put vista on it and now Seven ... I will be staying here as MSFT did an awesome job on it!

**Note: If you have installed the beta I highly recommending changing the taskbar to the setting that says "Combine When Taskbar is Full". That is when you right-click and go to properties ... it is the option for "Taskbar Buttons"**

Originally Posted by Nate Smith

Let me throw this out there...currently on Newegg, they have a total of 496 AMD & Intel motherboards available(not counting anything only listed under combo or server motherboards.) With this large of a potential install base for Windows, can we reasonably expect Microsoft to be able to test on every potential hardware configuration to ensure compatability, or can we say that they are doing their part by releasing documentation that tells the various hardware manufacturers "this is how you make your hardware work with Windows"? If the hardware companies are given this info, and then choose not to do anything with it, where should the blame really fall?

As far as Apple is concerned, I think the argument can be made that they are more in the CE (consumer electronics) business than the computer business. Apple's focus is on a system where everything "just works," and they are able to accomplish this by having a very small "supported" hardware base, and simply not letting their software not work on anything else, just as, for example, you could not take your iPod OS and install it on your Zune(I realize the hardware isn't as similar in that example, but I think it makes the point). Not that there is necessarily anything wrong with this approach, I just believe that because of it, MS and Apple can be considered to be targeting different markets.

You hit the nail on the head in that post, problem is alot of "consumers" don't understand why their computer won't work and can't think beyond pressing the on button, they just complain that MS put out a bad product. VISTA runs fine if you have the resources yet people with entry level machines are screaming that vista is no good.

I'm also thinking that MS should perhaps have different versions of their next OS and those being consumer, business, technical, the technical version would allow us to tweak and do what we want and the consumer version quite simpler to protect end users from themselves and be more for the people, the Mac type users who just want their system to work with as little tweaking and customizing as possible.

m

[Andrew Schreiber]

Originally Posted by Nate Smith

Let me throw this out there...currently on Newegg, they have a total of 496 AMD & Intel motherboards available(not counting anything only listed under combo or server motherboards.) With this large of a potential install base for Windows, can we reasonably expect Microsoft to be able to test on every potential hardware configuration to ensure compatability, or can we say that they are doing their part by releasing documentation that tells the various hardware manufacturers "this is how you make your hardware work with Windows"? If the hardware companies are given this info, and then choose not to do anything with it, where should the blame really fall?

As far as Apple is concerned, I think the argument can be made that they are more in the CE (consumer electronics) business than the computer business. Apple's focus is on a system where everything "just works," and they are able to accomplish this by having a very small "supported" hardware base, and simply not letting their software not work on anything else, just as, for example, you could not take your iPod OS and install it on your Zune(I realize the hardware isn't as similar in that example, but I think it makes the point). Not that there is necessarily anything wrong with this approach, I just believe that because of it, MS and Apple can be considered to be targeting different markets.

You have nailed why Apple is recognized as having a more reliable operating system. If OS X were required to run on even HALF of the hardware that Windows supports I think we would find that Windows is actually a better made operating system.

Vista is a nice operating system provided you have the drivers and the hardware to run it.

In my opinion, Windows 7 needs to be stable, needs to trim down on the hardware (hard drive space especially), and it needs to get rid of UAC. Meet those requirements and I think we might have a winner. I would personally like to see their new file system that was promised for Vista.

Just to keep things open, I am a Mac user who only uses XP for Cad.

And I have to agree with Craig, for rock solid uptime very few things can beat linux. My Ubuntu box has an uptime of nearly 60 days and that was only because of a power outage.

[Nate Smith]

Originally Posted by Andrew Schreiber

In my opinion, Windows 7 needs to be stable, needs to trim down on the hardware (hard drive space especially), and it needs to get rid of UAC. Meet those requirements and I think we might have a winner. I would personally like to see their new file system that was promised for Vista.

Stability: Check - During my short time with the 6801 build, the only real problems I had were with applications flat out not liking the new OS - didn't really expect anything different there, since it was still in Alpha at the time.
Hardware: Don't remember for sure, but supposedly things have been trimmed at least so that Aero can run on machines that it was previously not able to. Also, the default "clean install" sets up a separate "System" partition, which (theoretically) makes sure you can at least still boot to a console if your Windows partition gets FUBAR'd.
UAC: I actually agree with what they are trying to do with UAC, and they made the settings much more flexible with Win7. Rather than the simple UAC On/Off option that you had with Vista, there's actually about 5 different levels of UAC that you can choose from - basically from Off to "Protect me from Myself" and everything in between.
New File System(WinFS): It's my understanding that WinFS has been all but abandoned by MS, but some of the work on it is being rolled into future versions of SQL Server(since WinFS was SQL based anyway)...so, it's my guess that you'll never see it as an actual part of the OS, but it may make an appearance as an add-on for those who might need it. I actually played around with the Beta they released a while back, and honestly was not that impressed...the idea is nice, but could be implemented just as easily by allowing tags on files to categorize them. You see a little bit of this in Vista, where your default "Documents", "Pictures", "Music", etc folders in the user directories are not folders at all, but rather what I would call "meta-folders" (I think Win7 calls them "collections"), where you can specify multiple locations, that get combined into one for easier access. The physical folders still exist, of course, but you don't see them unless you go looking when you go to open or save a file. I used this to my advantage while I was using Win7, linking my music(stored on an external HDD) to show up in the "Music" metafolder, without having to use up the extra HDD space on my internal drive.

[Andrew Schreiber]

Thanks Nate, maybe instead of WinFS they will focus on reading/writing to other file systems. I am also glad that they added levels of UAC, protecting people from themselves is nice in a world where grandma doesn't know that sudo rm -R / is a bad idea.

[Bsteckler]

How did those who have beta copies get them? I have an MS account (and in fact, a beta of Server 2008). But I cannot find a download page.

[MrForbes]

from Microsoft, in big red letters: "If you are inquiring about being a beta tester for Windows 7, be advised that they are not accepting new participants at this time. Please do not submit a Feedback item to request participation in any programs.

Please visit the Connection Directory for all programs that are available to participate in."

http://beta.microsoft.com/Connect