Windows 7, so who's tried it?

Surprised no ones talked about the final version of 7 in the past few days.

1) This is my work laptop, I am a sysadmin for multiple clients, I'd rather not take a chance with possibly compromised versions of Windows.
2) I can legally download the actual RTM come thursday through my TechNet Direct access. I can wait.
 
Fucking thing just did it again. I plug in my camera thinking "Oh I can see the XP drive this time, I'll just direct the photos over there" and it decides to drop the drive and cause media player to crash (which was playing music stored on my NAS). It's really irritating.
 
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Fucking thing just did it again. I plug in my camera thinking "Oh I can see the XP drive this time, I'll just direct the photos over there" and it decides to drop the drive and cause media player to crash (which was playing music stored on my NAS). It's really irritating.

thats odd. I did a clean install and everything seems to work fine...no media player crashes...Explorer did crash once...but it was a random event.

I still have no complaints about 7 yet. Everything just flows smoothly.

EDIT:
@Adunaphel:
Sweet! Thanks for the heads up, I completely forgot I have access to MSDN. So it looks like Im not gonna be spending $200 come October after all!
 
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I plugged in my Logitech QuickCam Go and it downloaded the drivers automatically, but when it installed it said the software is incompatible with my OS. So I pulled it out, but when I did, it BLUE SCREENED.

I thought those things only happened to Windows XP and lower?! ARGH
 
I'm considering switiching from XP 64...

Is there a Windows 7 64 out yet? Where is the latest version?
 
I'm considering switiching from XP 64...

Is there a Windows 7 64 out yet? Where is the latest version?

Yes 7 comes in x64 version. If you have MSDN you can get the RTM version (which is the same as retail) otherwise you might have to wait till Oct.


Didn't see this thread so open a new one, copy pasting my review
So I got my hands on Windows 7 Ultimate RTM and proceeded to install it on my old laptop (TravelMate C310).
Specs:
Pentium M 1.8GHz
1.25GB RAM
GeForce Go 6200 (32MB video RAM with ability to share system RAM)

Installation:
Installation was from DVD so no swapping disks was required (not sure if there is even an option for CDs)
Chose my partition layout, told the setup my regional information and the rest of the process was taken care off automatically and quite quickly, about a half hour or so.

First boot:
On first boot majority of the hardware was recognized or had generic drivers installed.

Video - generic driver installed
Sound - no driver
Wi-Fi - no driver
Bluetooth - no driver (more on that later)
IR - no driver
5in1 card reader - no driver
Ethernet - recognized

Tablet portion worked out of the box but needed to be calibrated (no problem)

Beyond first boot:
As soon as network connection was available Windows automatically accessed WinUpdate services and downloaded drivers for Wi-Fi, Sound and the IR device. Wi-Fi set up was a breeze and connection was up and running within about 20 seconds (on my much newer main machine with Ubuntu it takes a minute or two).
Video driver was a bit tricky as I could not find one from nVidia that would work properly, however using "update driver" function in device manager downloaded and installed correct drivers. It also enabled the Aero Glass 3D engine after driver installation (required a reboot).

In order to get the 5in1 reader to work I downloaded the XP drivers from Acer, which installed with no fuss. I have yet to test the actual operation of the reader.

Special buttons:
As this is a convertible it comes with some special buttons for the tablet portion of it. Not much to mention, buttons allow you to scroll up/down and flip the screen image as needed. These were not recognized out of the box but again official XP driver from Acer did the trick.

Bluetooth:
This deserves its own special mention mostly because of the stupidity of Acer. That particular machine comes with a number of "hot buttons" above the F keys that require drivers to be installed. There is no driver available from Acer for these buttons, in order to use them one has to install management software that allows you to change what those buttons do. I was unable to find said software on the company's US site (on top of it US site had ONLY XP downloads) but did locate it on their EU site (which actually had Vista as an option as well).

The reason why I mention these buttons is because Bluetooth/Wi-Fi is controlled by them and the generic BIOS that is accessible to the user does not allow you to choose whether you want them on or off by default. There is a way to get into an expanded BIOS that has all these options but I don't know what it is on this particular machine.

So the default for Bluetooth was "OFF" and as a result it could not be detected by Windows. Once I got the correct drivers for the "hot" buttons I and turned Bluetooth on, Windows found the adapter w/o any issue. I still installed the official driver from Acer (Vista version) mostly because it offers a bit more functionality over the stock 7 driver.

First impressions:
As you can see from the specs this is not a powerhouse machine by any means, it is basically being used for iTunes because iTunes is very very slow in a virtualized environment and doesn't work on Linux.

The first thing that jumped out at me was the speed. Despite the machine's age it was very snappy. In fact I would say that it works faster than my main machine which is a Core 2 Duo with 4GB of RAM and a 64bit OS. As iTunes is the main reason for this machine I promptly installed the software. As a joke my girl friend (MacBook 13" less than a year old) opened her iTunes at the same time as I did and mine was faster by a second. However after she installed updates and I transfered all of my music my laptop ended up being a few seconds slower to usable iTunes. I still have to say not bad for something this old and it is definitely happier than it ever was with XP.

Beyond first impressions:
This being the Ultimate edition it comes with all the bells and whistles. So the first thing I tried was the Media Center. At first start it gave me a warning that the video card doesn't have enough RAM to run it and sure enough it was pretty sluggish.

One of the more interesting things that I found was the ability to fine tune power consumption. It had settings for USB sleep, PCIe sleep, cooling in addition to the usual CPU speed, screen and so on.

Can't comment too much on battery life as the battery is quite old and doesn't last very long anyway.

Another improvement that was quite welcome was in how quickly external drives are mounted. On Vista it takes quite a bit for a flash drive to be "installed" on first try on this it took about 10seconds before it was up and running.

Another good change was to the Indexing service, it now excludes App and AppData directories by default while in Vista it would index the entire drive, which caused quite a bit of slowness since App and AppData are modified quite often by running software.

Some cons:
Control Panel layout - this might just be a matter of habit but the layout is very confusing, there are too many paths to take from one place to the next. Alot of things were given their own entries and it gets quite cluttered using a "classic" layout. On the other hand the "new" layout is pretty tightly grouped, too much in my opinion but again its a matter of habit.

Overall:
This is what Vista should have been, this finally feels like something you would expect from a multi-billion dollar corporation. In my opinion this is a worthwhile upgrade and anyone still on XP should at the very least consider it.
 
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Mines still running perfectly now, and I still have yet to find something or somewhere that its worse than XP or vista at. Honestly its stable as f*ck. Just left it on as a fileserver all weekend and when I got home it was perfect, no crashes or freezes (something Vista did regularly on the same machine).
 
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I'm starting to get the BSOD quiet a bit on my laptop lately...
 
Man if I had a nickel for every time I heard something not too far from that from people being serious...

LOL seriously? They need to update their PSU drivers then :D Somewhat OT replacement adapter I ordered is comming from about 20 blocks from my house :LOL:

I'm really liking 7 right now there is a not so remote possibility of my main (Ubuntu) system becoming a 7 system *hides*
 
LOL seriously? They need to update their PSU drivers then :D Somewhat OT replacement adapter I ordered is comming from about 20 blocks from my house :LOL:

I'm really liking 7 right now there is a not so remote possibility of my main (Ubuntu) system becoming a 7 system *hides*

Honest to God-

"Windows killed my monitor"

"Windows blew out my DVD drive"

"Windows froze my iPod"
 
7 is still running great for me.

@nsx_23: Id hold out on installing 7 on a laptop until its officially released my the laptops manufacturer since laptops have so many custom drivers.
 
@nsx_23: Id hold out on installing 7 on a laptop until its officially released my the laptops manufacturer since laptops have so many custom drivers.

Not necessary. If the manufacturer supports Vista, it supports 7, since there is almost 100% driver compatibility between the two.
 
^I'm having some driver issues with my M-Audio Delta 2496 soundcard.. It works fine but it hangs the comp. on shut down. Not a huge problem, but somewhat annoying.
 
anyone try 7 on netbooks with not a ton of RAM yet?
I hear/read that it should be as quick as XP is on netbooks, but I'm sceptical...

Is 7 just "Vista without all the unnecessary visual crap and huge memory hog stuff"?
 
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