Windows 7

[Andrew Schreiber]

Originally Posted by killerofkiller

You do know that you can turn Aero off, and run the 'classic' theme just like xp.. invest in some ram, i'm running a 2.5 year old thinkpad with an old ati x1300 video card and it runs great with 2 gigs of ram...

Agreed, our team laptop runs Vista but BARELY met the requirements so we just turned all the fluff off, went all the way back to windows 98 look and feel.

[killerofkiller]

also, i was using Win7 build 6956(the one that leaked from the Chinese Conference) for about a month. And i just installed the 7000 build (beta1)
Runs like a dream, all the drivers installed perfectly. CS4, matlab, office and a few others all installed just fine. (If interested in how to get it, just use the googles )

Originally Posted by killerofkiller

also, i was using Win7 build 6956(the one that leaked from the Chinese Conference) for about a month. And i just installed the 7000 build (beta1)
Runs like a dream, all the drivers installed perfectly. CS4, matlab, office and a few others all installed just fine. (If interested in how to get it, just use the googles )

I am going to wait until I can get the beta legally from the MS site but it's amazing the good reviews of this OS so far and just how badly people want it, thats a good sign that MS might have come up with a winner after all the bad press they got on vista. I can't wait to get mine

[daltore]

Originally Posted by 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.

Grandma would have to hit "y" about 10,000 times for that to really work. I think she'd figure out something was up by then. You need an "f" flag for it to delete everything without asking. And that's for Posix systems anyway.

I'm an avid Linux user because Windows has always proved to crash for me. I know it's because my line of home computers running Windows have always "met" the hardware requirements, and not exceeded them substantially, but it kind of says something when you need a $400 computer in order to boot up. All the Windows machines I use are usually slow, also, because of all of the non-Microsoft hardware installed on them that's always running in the background and taking up resources. Personally, I just don't like the fact that it runs generally slowly unless you have a gaming-scale computer.

That being said, when Vista had just come out, I was working with a guy to set up one of the laptops his company had just bought (that day, right out of the package) that had been pre-configured for a wireless internet cafe. We're both computer nerds. It took 5 minutes for the computer to boot up, and another 20 for the two of us to figure out where Vista had hidden the WiFi card control to turn it on (the button on the computer didn't do it). I would just like the next version to organize things a little better (either pre-Vista style or just logically placed under the labels that happen to pertain to their contents). Then when we turned it off, it idled for 10 minutes (no hard drive activity, any "active" processes contained somewhere within RAM and the CPU) before the power actually shut off. So, better resource management might also help.

One of my friends has a fairly adequate laptop for running Vista, and it ran acceptably, but the only problem is it went through about a 4 amp-hour battery in about 45 minutes because everything was always running. He switched to Ubuntu and the battery started lasting him about 3 hours at a time. Power management could be better handled. Even if it's for a desktop, there's no reason to waste that much power.

Another thing that's peeved me in general about all the Windows OS's is that when you're logging in, you have to wait a bit before you can do anything. Now, this is a no brainer and to be expected on any operating system, but the system should not spend all of its resources loading MSN messenger when you've just clicked on Firefox. Some kind of real-time engine would be a very nice addition to the kernel. And if this would require new drivers for everything, that might be an issue they should work on too, standardization of the kernel protocols. You can use an Ubuntu realtime kernel in a Fedora Zen installation with no problems if you add the right files in. You don't have to reinstall anything. And then it'll update correctly the next time there's a new version. So it is possible, and it would make their fan base a lot wider because of the improved and consistent support.

One thing that amazed me when I got to Linux was the lack of a need for defragmenting the drive. The main Linux partition is setup to always rearrange the files when you're planting them so that the drive is not fragmented, therefore removing the need to do it manually and decreasing required access time. WinFS may not be such a bad idea, as it would remove this problem. Not to mention that their current default, NTFS, has enough complexities to it that there are MULTIPLE open-source tools installed by default on Ubuntu devoted ONLY to diagnosing and fixing NTFS drives. Maybe they could adopt the operating system that was being developed several years ago that would never need to expand its filetable because it would take the energy required to vaporize the earth's oceans to write a one to every bit the filesystem could hold. I believe it was called znfs, or something similar, but it might be could to move to a standardized multi-platform FS.

And if I understand correctly what you're talking about with the UAC levels, it sounds like they're finally doing something about the fact that there are very few manual controls for Windows, and most major problems are fixed by backing up and reinstalling. That's one of the reasons I use Linux, if there's a problem, it gives you a precise error about the issue, usually how to fix it, or a resource to find out how, and then you run a command and it's over with. The Windows commands are generally somewhere along the lines of, "There was an error. It was either because 'foo.dll' is not a Windows file or has been corrupted." They could put a little more trust in their users, or at least the computer repair people who need specific errors to fix the problem.

If what people on this thread are saying about Win7 is true, then MS has taken a huge jump forward from their several backward steps 2 years ago, and I applaud them. I will probably stick with Linux because it better supports the things I do and is quick on old hardware (typing this on a 2003 laptop with a 1.2 GHz processor and 256 MB RAM with 3 other windows and 6 tabs open), but it would be really nice for me to not have someone e-mailing me every couple of days going, "My computer broke, can you help me?"

[Jeff K.]

People bag on Vista because of a technical term called...the bandwagon effect. They hear it sucks from others or from reviews and then they blindly concur that it sucks, and in doing so, join the band wagon. I've been using Vista for almost a year now on my Vaio laptop, never had a problem with drivers or software. I will admit Vista does require a lot of processing power for all the fancy gadgets and effects, and so lower end computers that people get for cheap will probably leave them waiting on it. Changing the settings to just what you need and upgrading the ram are good ways to speed it up. On a 2.4ghz Intel dualcore with 4 gb of ram, startup time < 20 seconds and I can run all CAD programs I need to and other programs without a hitch. Connected to all my old devices that were pre Vista and even pre XP old. I do plan on getting a Mac laptop though just for the aesthetic qualities, I must admit they are quite sexy. But I do plan to continue running MS desktops because I can build them and I don't need to spend an arm and leg to upgrade the ram.

[Tom Line]

Originally Posted by samir13k

I'm with you on this one... once you get vista fine tuned to where you like it (i.e. set up security and defaults) it is not as bad as the reviews have been saying it was. I personally refused to install XP on my Vista computer, but i see where it had its problems when it was a new release. At least it was a bigger hit than Windows ME...(I invested in that one too...didnt do anything spectacular though!)

Mainly i think people were not ready for such a dramatic change as Vista was.

From my experience, the people who thought vista were ok were the ones who bought a whole new computer from a vendor.

The people who disliked vista were the enthusiasts and system builders that like choosing their own components, and the ones who upgraded their operating system without changing components.

Group one generally didn't have many problems since vendors like dell tested everything and made sure all the drivers worked. Group two had an absolute nightmare because so many components simply didn't work. That's what people liked about xp - it simply worked with nearly everything.

Most folks don't remember though that XP didn't work that way when it started out!

I have another question and I have nearly crashed google a few times researching this one out but still don't have a 100% answer yet.

My current laptop is an Asus F3 series, Vista ultimate, 4G ram, Core@duo 2.20Ghz, runs vista fine, I work in news and severe weather so I don't run too many programs, we have radio scanner programming software like Arc996 by butel.nl, some other small programs like Grlevel3 Grlevelx.com and CrossFTP basic which is very important as that how I get video out to one of the TV stations, also run virtualdub for capture and probably sony vegas soon so nothing too major...yet.

I am holding off though on upgrading to 64 bit Vista because even though 32 bit older programs will work the drivers must be digitally signed and there appears to be no easy work around, guess the only way is to upgrade and find out but I don't have as much free time to play as I would like

I am also toying with the idea since I don't have a permanent desktop about retiring this latop to the desk as that way I would also have a permanent always on ftp machine here and getting the Asus G50Vt-A2 as my new mobile laptop, I am trying not to keep looking at the Canadacomputers.com website but it's on for a really good price right now.

This 32 bit vs 64 bit digitally signed driver issue has me still very unsure of what to do.

mark

[Nate Smith]

Not one to normally bump a thread like this, but aparrently Microsoft is releasing a free public Beta 1 of Windows 7 on Friday. Check out this site for more info...
http://www.computerworld.com/action/...leId=9125 278

[spacegy4]

I used a nifty trick to force direct x10 on XP... and anyways if win7 has better 64 bit support (which vista was already quite impressive) I will definitely pay it a look.

[EncodersRUS]

Vista runs smoother if you make the windows perfectly clear and disable recent items. Also if you run a defrag every other day and don't use more than 11.6% of memory it works like a dream . SO HA! (psssss.... my vista is no longer vista. I personally upgraded my drivers and my source code and MS no longer recognizes most of my Vista.)

I am currently downloading windows7 64 bit from this link and it's working

http://download.microsoft.com/downlo...FRE_EN_DVD.ISO

The win 7 32 bit is a no go right now, too many people tried to download it an MS's servers exploded

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/e.../dd353205.aspx

I placed a spare smoke alarm over my laptop and modem before I go to sleep tonight, downloading win7 64 x2 and uploading 5g's of news video at the same time, poor modem

m

[synth3tk]

Originally Posted by Mark Rozitis

I placed a spare smoke alarm over my laptop and modem before I go to sleep tonight, downloading win7 64 x2 and uploading 5g's of news video at the same time, poor modem

m

lol, I feel it, although I've never had to upload 5-gigs of anything! My WRT54GL with DD-WRT has been serving me pretty darn well. It can take just about anything I can throw at it.

I'm downloading the win7 x64 right now, also. Capped at 2MB/s, averaging 800kb/s, with about 28% left to go. I still need a key, but at least we get 30-days to try it out. MS should've been prepared for this, but nooooo....

[Hanna2325]

...Its windows...and I'm a loyal follower of Macs, so nope

[synth3tk]

Well, I'm a Linux-junkie, and not much of a Windoze fan myself, but this is what Vista was supposed to be like, so I'm interested. Especially since the requirements have been lowered, less annoying pop-up notifications, etc.

Originally Posted by synth3tk

lol, I feel it, although I've never had to upload 5-gigs of anything! My WRT54GL with DD-WRT has been serving me pretty darn well. It can take just about anything I can throw at it.

I'm downloading the win7 x64 right now, also. Capped at 2MB/s, averaging 800kb/s, with about 28% left to go. I still need a key, but at least we get 30-days to try it out. MS should've been prepared for this, but nooooo....

Any idea where we get the keys? I downloaded and installed win7 64 as a second OS this morning, install was super fast, 45 min and done but it won't connect to the internet with my cable modem no matter what I try so I still have to figure that out and it asks for a key and I m not sure were we are supposed to get the keys but then again I haven't had much time to read and I have to go back out on the road now.

Still want to get the 32 bit version as well and try it.

mark