Windows 7, so who's tried it?

:facepalm:

I've got a quite a few more, but I'd rather not see you concussed by the amount of face palming that would happen.

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"?

The visual "crap" was only enabled if the system checks determined DWM could be run. Sad thing is Aero (and the desktop windows manager) was a bloated piece in and of itself. But that's a rant for another day. Most netbooks did not have the GPU horsespower to run DWM so it wasn't enabled on those devices very often.

And what memory hog stuff?

7 is a a far more optimized at the kenrel level compared to Vista. There was 2 years of a mandate to increase speed at the kernel level for Windows 7, increase suspend, startup and shut down times. Strip the fat from the kernel and the shell. Kernel made huge leaps, shell made big leaps.

Windows 8 will strip more fat from both, and hopefully, HOPEFULLY will see limited x86 support....but again, rant for another day.
 
I've got a quite a few more, but I'd rather not see you concussed by the amount of face palming that would happen.
Thank you for caring, I do work in IT support but it's mostly UNIX so I rarely get completely idiotic questions :)

The visual "crap" was only enabled if the system checks determined DWM could be run. Sad thing is Aero (and the desktop windows manager) was a bloated piece in and of itself. But that's a rant for another day. Most netbooks did not have the GPU horsespower to run DWM so it wasn't enabled on those devices very often.

And what memory hog stuff?

7 is a a far more optimized at the kenrel level compared to Vista. There was 2 years of a mandate to increase speed at the kernel level for Windows 7, increase suspend, startup and shut down times. Strip the fat from the kernel and the shell. Kernel made huge leaps, shell made big leaps.

Windows 8 will strip more fat from both, and hopefully, HOPEFULLY will see limited x86 support....but again, rant for another day.
I was going to ask you if you know what kind of changes were being made. The visual crap doesn't seem too bad on this one but then again I have decently powerful video cards in both laptops :p

So I finally got fed up with some idiotic issues that the latest Ubuntu release had. Like taking 4 hours to transfer 6gigs of data onto a USB drive....

Windows 7 went up on my main machine today, Dell XPS M1330n*

I went for the x64 version since this machine has 4GB of RAM.
Took about 20-25 minutes to install, did it while at work :)

On reboot almost everything was recognized (even Wi-Fi). Things that did not work right away:
Finger print reader
5in1 Card reader

Plugged it into the intarwebs and drivers for all of the hardware were automatically downloaded.

Camera did not get recognized until later and touchpad required a Dell driver for the scrolling to work. Bluetooth was recognized and installed, however I still needed Dell's drivers for A2DP to work but once that was installed it worked absolutely awesomely.

So far running very snappy, I installed all the software I need and even Dawn of War seems to be working fine.

I really like the fact that there is a built in mechanism that uses fingerprint reader as I hate having 3rd party software that I don't need.

Suspend takes a little while but wake up is insanely fast about as fast as my g/f's Mac and that thing is like an iPod on wake up. Wi-Fi acquires address extremely quickly which is a huge plus.

Definetly a good OS I would recommend anyone looking to upgrade to go straight for 7 over Vista.
 
Actually, most netbooks now have the Intel GMA 950 which is capable enough for Aero. Not sure about older ones.

Anyway, haven't tried it because I don't feel like reverting at launch, but I hear it runs quite well on netbooks. 1 GB of RAM would be recommended though.
 
GMA915 is not even properly recognized by 7, meaning no Aero and in my case, running at a maximum resolution of 1024x768 instead of the actual max res of 1280x768 or 800 or whatever. Installed the RTM on said laptop last night, went smoothly as with the elleventy other installs, but I haven't really done anything on it yet so no impressions. I'm going to put the 64 bit version on my desktop tonight, first time with a 64 bit since I didn't even realize the cpu wasn't 32.
 
Oh another thing I forgot to mention. I have an HDMI out on my laptop, plugged it in and Win recognized the TV automatically, cloned my screen, adjusted the resolution and set the audio output to go over HDMI all without any interference from me. Tested it playing some vids and it worked perfectly.
 
Not necessary. If the manufacturer supports Vista, it supports 7, since there is almost 100% driver compatibility between the two.

Good to know. Still gonna wait for them to release 7 though since I have a free upgrade to 7 on my laptop :).

I cant even put in words how much better driver support seems in 7 than Vista. My wireless cardS (yes I bought 2 thinking it was just the cards problem) caused endless system hangs in Vista. In 7 the drivers are built in, so no third party installations were necessary...and needless to say it works 100% now! my Printer and GPU were both installed instantly upon startup. Creative sound card still needed a driver download tho, which was a disappointment since its made by a large corporation.

another small but good thing I noticed in 7 is that if a computer is using a network share off a 7 computer, the 7 computer doesnt auto shutdown/sleep/hibernate. its a small change but it actually makes a difference. That being said, Ive noticed that file sharing both TO and FROM the 7 machine is much easier than it used to be, used to get endless problems and acess errors with Vista but now...flawless. It actually shows that microsoft was thinking about practicality when they made 7.

Technically, I am running a dual boot of Ubuntu and 7 (used to run Vista and 7) but I havent even bothered to reinstall the Bootloader to let me boot into ubuntu again (Windows 7 overwrote the boot loader as windows always does). But I really dont ever feel the need to use Ubuntu on that machine anymore - I think its partly due to the great driver support in 7 and the absence of freezing while doing menial (and intense) tasks. Sorry Ubuntu, but add the vast amount of support that developers give Windows and 7 just blows you back to where you were 3 years ago.
 
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Creative soundcards have some of the worst drivers out there. One reason I will never buy one.

They haven't been able to make good drivers since the sound blaster 16, even the awe32/64 had shit drivers (live probably takes the cake though)
 
So.. if I wanted a new laptop and had the choice of either Vista or 7, I would assume 7 would be the lesser evil at the moment? :lol:
 
So.. if I wanted a new laptop and had the choice of either Vista or 7, I would assume 7 would be the lesser evil at the moment? :lol:
I had no chance to try out Windows 7 yet, but since I only hear good things about it and Vista is pretty much officially crap, I assume it's safe to say go with 7.
 
So.. if I wanted a new laptop and had the choice of either Vista or 7, I would assume 7 would be the lesser evil at the moment? :lol:

I would get 7, vista is complete shit. Only thing is 7 isn't officially out till Oct however most manufacturers will give you a free Win 7 upgrade if you get a laptop now.
 
I would get 7, vista is complete shit. Only thing is 7 isn't officially out till Oct however most manufacturers will give you a free Win 7 upgrade if you get a laptop now.

Yea I noticed that when I was looking at Dell's website. Now to figure out which maker to go with.
 
Quite a few manufacturers are doing it now...just make sure it's not "Vista Basic" because that doesn't qualify for the free upgrade.
 
Just installed it on my MacBook (build 7056 or something I believe). While I'm not blown away by it I must admit I am quite pleasantly surprise by some of the improvements over Vista.

First I'd like to begin with a crash. On the second half of the installation it decided to not continue, it got stuck and I had to reboot the computer and then reinstall the OS because it couldn't resume the installation. I'd like to say "beta" but the installer looks suspiciously like Vista's installer :-D

Well anyway, onto the good stuff now:

- Wifi working at the first boot without drivers: I say good
- Very fast after all the drivers installed: I say good. Even games runs as well as on XP!
- UAC not complaining every time you want to empty the trash or something: Dear god, at last... Now it's still here but it's far from being annoying. I still think it's a bit pointless though because it still doesn't asks you for your password so anyone can just sit in front of your computer and install whatever they want if you forgot to lock your session (what 95% of users don't do).

Odd stuff:
- No mail client? I'm looking for an explanation here :-D

Subjective stuff:
- Still not fond of the look and feel of the thing.


Well, I didn't test it for very long (that second reinstallation took a lot of my free time :-D) but apart from the ergonomics, which I still can't stand, it looks like a very big improvement over Vista.
It will not be enough to make me use it as my primary operating system but hats off to Microsoft to address most of the issues of Vista.

(And don't forget all of this is coming from the biggest Apple fanboy you'll get the chance to see :-D)

Now the big question: why didn't you make Vista like that in the first place? :-D
 
yes! the sys admins for my department finally added 7 (only professional edition) to our microsoft msdn downloads!

Yay for (lazy?) sysadmins that let us create unlimited accounts with MSDN!
 
yes! the sys admins for my department finally added 7 (only professional edition) to our microsoft msdn downloads!

Yay for (lazy?) sysadmins that let us create unlimited accounts with MSDN!

create me a cd key :p
 
Just installed it on my MacBook (build 7056 or something I believe).

You should keep that quiet, if the Mac scene finds out they'll send their extremists round.
 
You should keep that quiet, if the Mac scene finds out they'll send their extremists round.
Yeah, but they're gonna kill you in a really funky and creative way. :p
 
And then charge you 10x the price you'd pay an independant hitman for the same thing. :p
 
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