Windows 7, so who's tried it?

Thanks for the link, but I don't want to install Win7 64bit just to find out if these hardwares works or not. I checked Panasonic's website, there's no Vista or Win7 driver listed, so I'm pretty sure on that one. The controller is some cheap Chinese brand (Betop C033). I seriously doubt they would make a signed Win7 driver for such an old product. But on the 32bit Win7, I can at least try forcing the Vista or XP drivers to install, they may work.
 
I've been running Windows 7 for almost a month now. No problems to report. Well..when I say no problems I mean none that are seem to be caused by Windows itself.

Bought a new desktop a few months ago. It came with 64-bit Vista installed. The machine had an nVidia GT220 graphics card for your basic gaming and what not. Problem is the driver for this card seems to keep crashing and crashing. I've had to install the original driver because the problem only got worse with each upgrade.

The computer was sold with a free upgrade to Win 7. Upgrading didn't help with this particular annoyance.

My intention from the beginning was to upgrade to a Radeon 5770 for extra performance and also the low power consumption. All will hopefully be well after changing the card.

After using Windows XP for several years I'm just really glad Vista and 7 both have the ability to recover from lock ups such as this driver stopping to respond. Otherwise I'd be restarting the whole system all the time.
 
awdrifter said:
Thanks for the link, but I don't want to install Win7 64bit just to find out if these hardwares works or not. I checked Panasonic's website, there's no Vista or Win7 driver listed, so I'm pretty sure on that one. The controller is some cheap Chinese brand (Betop C033). I seriously doubt they would make a signed Win7 driver for such an old product. But on the 32bit Win7, I can at least try forcing the Vista or XP drivers to install, they may work.
Click to expand...

Win7 64 bit takes 32 bit drivers too. 32 bit XP/Vista driver for that matter.

And your drivers doesn't need to be signed.

So I don't know what you are on about, moving to 64 bit is a definite. Only reason you shouldn't use 64 bit OS is if you don't have a x64 cpu.
 
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Win7 x64 has the same driver signing requirement that Vista x64 has, you can disable it by going into test mode, but you have to do that on every boot just like Vista x64.
 
MadCow809 said:
Win7 64 bit takes 32 bit drivers too. 32 bit XP/Vista driver for that matter.
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:shock:

Not even close amigo. :) You can't run a 32 bit kernel mode driver in a 64bit environment. You can run 32bit USER mode applications thanks to Windows on Windows and the EMT64 x86-64 CPU support modes, but you can't do it with device drivers.

MadCow809 said:
And your drivers doesn't need to be signed.
Click to expand...

They do need to be signed, but hardly any hardware maker doesn't have their 64bit drivers signed these days. And you'll likely find that Win7 will have inbox drivers to support a lot of those older devices. So if the manufacturer doesn't have a driver listed, it's just as likely the class driver shipped in Win7 will support it.

MadCow809 said:
So I don't know what you are on about, moving to 64 bit is a definite. Only reason you shouldn't use 64 bit OS is if you don't have a x64 cpu.
Click to expand...

+1.


awdrifter said:
Thanks for the link, but I don't want to install Win7 64bit just to find out if these hardwares works or not. I checked Panasonic's website, there's no Vista or Win7 driver listed, so I'm pretty sure on that one. The controller is some cheap Chinese brand (Betop C033). I seriously doubt they would make a signed Win7 driver for such an old product. But on the 32bit Win7, I can at least try forcing the Vista or XP drivers to install, they may work.
Click to expand...

Did you run the upgrade advisor?
 
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The upgrade advisor said the printer is not compatible for both 32 and 64bit version of Win7. But it didn't say anything about the game controller. It also said the trackball software that I'm using is not compatible, but that's not a big deal, I can use the trackball without the additional function. Alcohol120%, Musicmatch Jukebox and TMPGEnc 4.0 is also incompatible. So it looks like I'll have to wait a bit before upgrading at all.
 
newer versions of alcohol should work, musicmatch jukebox....

i'd be surprised if TMPGEnc didn't work.
 
MMJB and TMPGEnc might work if I ran it in compatibility mode. But Alcohol120% might not. In the upgrade advisor report, it didn't say Update Available, so I'm not sure on that one.

Alcohol 120%
version 1.9.5.3105
Alcohol Soft Development Team Not compatible This version of the program will not work on Windows 7.
Visit the publisher's website for a possible solution
Microsoft IntelliPoint 6.3
version 6.30.191.0
Microsoft Not compatible This version of the program will not work on Windows 7.
Visit the publisher's website for a possible solution
Click to expand...
 
awdrifter said:
MMJB and TMPGEnc might work if I ran it in compatibility mode. But Alcohol120% might not. In the upgrade advisor report, it didn't say Update Available, so I'm not sure on that one.
Click to expand...

what about alcohol's actual website?
 
Woo, free Win7 upgrade shipped today. I'll still probably get one of the $70 Ultimate disks from Uni, but that can wait.
 
Some questions (;

1. Are there some serious "starting faults"?

2. Is it running better than XP (and vista)?

3. Is it time to let my XP die? :D
 
^
1. apart from the bios stuff people have alked about, none that I know of. My installation is running fine.

2. Mine is, but then again, my Vista install was really bloated. It's definitely not as fast as when i got it new obviously, but it is still pretty speedy. It's also a lot more stable than Vista was on my machine.

3. Up to you entirely. Personally, after using Vista and now Win7 as my primary OS for over 2 years, I can't stand XP- I find it very aged and lacking features that I now come to almost expect. It's also why I'm waiting for the stores around here to change their netbooks over to Win7. But you should get used to it over time.
 
Come on Royal Mail. 7 Should be here tomorrow although I'm not sure if I'm putting it away for someone to get me as an Xmas present. I've really been using the new taskbar on the RC over the last couple of days when transferring lots of files between multiple folders, does make things much easier.
 
Small Guy said:
Some questions (;

1. Are there some serious "starting faults"?

2. Is it running better than XP (and vista)?

3. Is it time to let my XP die? :D
Click to expand...

1. Not that I've seen. The first time Windows Update ran it installed a newer NIC driver which borked networking, but all I had to do to fix it was rollback to the previous driver, and everything has been working fine since. I have a couple of games that didn't want to run at first, but I found solutions quickly on Google; both cases were simply a matter of running the game as an administrator. There are a few - and really only a few - older programs that aren't compatible with the x64 versions (i.e. firewalls and drive emulation software like D-tools), but nearly all of those have newer replacements that are compatible.

2. 7 definitely runs better than Vista, and on my computer even runs better than XP. I've seen some reports and benchmarks that suggest it's a toss-up between XP and 7 on older hardware (single-core CPU and 1GB RAM or less) but on newer hardware, especially with multi-core CPUs, 7 has the advantage.

3. I was prepared to do a dual-boot installation so I could go back to XP as needed, but I've been running 7 for a month now and don't have any plans to do a dual-boot. I haven't had any need at all. So far, all my software (games included) has worked fine. In fact, my computer runs significantly better than before.
 
Small Guy said:
Some questions (;

1. Are there some serious "starting faults"?

2. Is it running better than XP (and vista)?

3. Is it time to let my XP die? :D
Click to expand...

1. None at all.

2. Hell yeah

3. See 2.
 
From time to time, I used to do math problems in paint in Windows XP when I was too lazy to get out a pencil and some paper, so when I found the Math Input Panel in Windows 7 the other day, I felt like one of the people in those "Windows 7 was MY idea" commercials :D
 
Strelok16 said:
I felt like one of the people in those "Windows 7 was MY idea" commercials :D
Click to expand...

Shame, I always want to beat those people with their laptops when I see those. Especially if it's a woman... <_<
 
Its very nice to hear that theres no major faults! XP will be left to die :D
 
brydiem said:
^
1. apart from the bios stuff people have alked about, none that I know of. My installation is running fine.

2. Mine is, but then again, my Vista install was really bloated. It's definitely not as fast as when i got it new obviously, but it is still pretty speedy. It's also a lot more stable than Vista was on my machine.

3. Up to you entirely. Personally, after using Vista and now Win7 as my primary OS for over 2 years, I can't stand XP- I find it very aged and lacking features that I now come to almost expect. It's also why I'm waiting for the stores around here to change their netbooks over to Win7. But you should get used to it over time.
Click to expand...

I agree; Even though XP ran faster, I still preferred Vista because it was a huge step forward in terms of the look and feel. XP is just Win95 with a facelift.

Vista wasn't as bad for me as it was for others, but I still had to get Win7 and I'm glad I made the switch. :)
 
ive really gotten used to Windows 7. especially resizing and re-arranging windows.
like today, i was in my schools computer lab (the computers there still run xp) working on a programming assignment and when i launched Visual Studio, it wasnt full screen my default. so i tried to make it full screen by dragging the window to the top of the screen like you can do in win7. i was confused until i realized that you cant do that in xp. As a whole, win7 does make a lot of little things simpler and quicker to do.
 
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