Windows 7

Cornellius

Cornellius

Active member
Who tried it ? Who's using it ?

I have it since it came with my laptop. I have the Home Premium (in french). I love it, a big improvement over Vista, and I have to say it, over XP too. When XP came out and when Vista came out too, for me, XP was the best Windows. Now, 7 became my favorite one.
 
I don't own a Windows 7 computer but have to deal with them every day at work. Sure it has a slick interface but it is the system that has given us the most problems. We get netbooks which have identical hardware but are sold as different models because of the included OS. A fresh install of XP will run flawlessly while 7 has such high resource usage that just surfing the internet while listening to an mp3 causes extreme stuttering in the sound even after disabling Aero. Needless to say customers are not happy when there is nothing we can do to fix this. 7 Starter which many netbooks are being sold with doesn't even let you change the desktop wallpaper without using a 3rd party app. I'm just waiting for the day ReactOS reaches a usable state.
 
I've been running Windows 7 since it was in RC stages. I see it more as a "dot upgrade" from Vista. There are a few new features here and there, but for general day-to-day use it really isn't much different than Vista. I'm not really a fan of the "Super Bar", but it's not the worst thing Microsoft has done.

One feature I do particularly like is the new "Connect to a Projector" application, it allows me to easily disable my secondary monitor and only use the primary.
 
I actually like Windows 7 quite a bit. I don't think I've ever had any performance problems (not when I had 2 GB of RAM, and definitely not now that I have 4 GB...running the x64 version of the OS). I definitely think it shouldn't be on Netbooks though. Those are definitely not powerful machines by anyone's standards, and would be better served with a stripped down XP or some variety of Linux. It seems like common sense to me that a system with a weaker CPU, probably little GPU graphics acceleration and not a ton of RAM would be best with something very very light...the lighter the better. I guess it should be said I'm running it on a good Desktop machine (best one I've ever put together) so my experience is going to be different than those using it on a Netbook.

Anyway, I expected to hate it from my experience with Vista, but I ended up actually liking it. It feels like a bit improvement over Vista to me. Yes, some of the interface changes are jarring (having gone from XP directly to this) but I was kind of impressed with it when I was testing it out before installing it as the primary OS.
 
Agreed on Win7 not being on netbooks. It's basically an emachine in my opinion. It's getting ridiculous with net-books, Ipads, and all kinds of stupid toys like them being treated like they were actually PC's when they should be running a stripped down version of XP or better yet Linux which would not overwhelm the hardware.

I was over at Tigerdirect earlier today just to see what was on sale and they had a sweet Gateway 2.8 ghz AMD Phenomx4 quadcore 8 gb ram 1 terabyte HD ect and 64 bit Win 7 for only $649. Kind of amazing that a PC can cost so little with specs like that compared to what you could buy for twice that much 10 years ago.
 
i love 7. i have it installed on a xeon dual core desktop with 4gb ram and a 9800gtx+ video card.

its pretty sweet, and it really doesnt take as much ram as a vista install. but i agree on the netbook thing, though the nvidia ion gc module should improve speed.
 
Well, on my laptop, Windows 7 and games run without any problems. It depends and the laptop I guess. Nowdays, the standard seems to be 2 or 4 Gig ram. The second thing to watch is the video card.
 
Windows Vista was the beta of 7
There are still elements of classic windows not gone.
Adjusted the start menu back (why it was 2x the size on default is stupid)
put back quick launch from somewhere I don't remember in the users dir (better then that stupid snap in shit)
placed "my computer" and all that shit back on the desktop (had to hack out 2 of some MS icon shit I forgot what it was from the registry)
Sadly there is a phantom option for the classic start menu but it does nothing. I think its still possible to get it back. I am just guessing, but I think its just the resource that was just deleted. I still have a copy of explorer.exe from vista so maybe its just a simple matter of cut and paste in MSVS.
I have copied the classic vista mspaint back in too. I use vista's because I don't have the 64 bit version of XP, but same thing anyways (Fuck that MSoffice UI cant find shit)
Enabled the explorer classic "file edit view tools help" bar (why is this shit all disabled? No wonder people can't get their computers to work)
Go into your local group policy editor and customize what you feel works

and for an extra comment

Don't use the 32bit version of windows if you have a 64bit possessor (there is no reason for it unless you don't like ram past 4gigs)
The only reason for 32bit is for legacy possessors THATS IT
 
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pipes said:
Don't use the 32bit version of windows if you have a 64bit possessor (there is no reason for it unless you don't like ram past 4gigs)
The only reason for 32bit is for legacy possessors THATS IT
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Had no choices since my processor is only 32 bits. It doesn't really matters since I have 4 Gig of ram and some programs still won't work on a 64 bits system. Sure, 64 bits systems are more "secure" than 32 bits systems, but not a lot more.
 
Cornellius said:
Had no choices since my processor is only 32 bits. It doesn't really matters since I have 4 Gig of ram and some programs still won't work on a 64 bits system. Sure, 64 bits systems are more "secure" than 32 bits systems, but not a lot more.
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What apps wouldn't work? Only problems I've had are a few 16-Bit apps not running, and then it was easier to use an emulator like DOSbox anyway.
 
The 9th Sage said:
What apps wouldn't work? Only problems I've had are a few 16-Bit apps not running, and then it was easier to use an emulator like DOSbox anyway.
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I mean, even today, 64 bits applications aren't that widespread yet. The main advantage of 64 bits systems are for added performance for applications specially made for 64 bits processors. There's not a lot of vendors who offer 64 bit version of their systems yet. Otherwise, there is no real differences between 32 and 64 bits systems.
 
Cornellius said:
I mean, even today, 64 bits applications aren't that widespread yet. The main advantage of 64 bits systems are for added performance for applications specially made for 64 bits processors. There's not a lot of vendors who offer 64 bit version of their systems yet. Otherwise, there is no real differences between 32 and 64 bits systems.
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That's going to change though. If I'm building a system with the intent of using it for the next five years or so, I'm going to be thinking ahead. Also, I thought WoW32 was pretty good at running 32-bit apps on 64-bit versions of Windows, since x64 processors running in compatibility mode effective are x86 processors. That's really their biggest strength, bulletproof backward compatibility.

On another note, I would have to note this as an advantage of Linux and FOSS. As far as I can see, the only apps on my system right now that are x86 are a few I run through Wine. Every single native application, without exception, is x64. The only semi-holdout is Firefox and other Mozilla apps, where I believe TraceMonkey still lacks an x64 backend (it's enabled in trunk, but not any release version, despite being quite stable), so I'm stuck with the regular SpiderMonkey interpreter. That really sucks, Mozilla need to get a fucking move on with TraceMonkey-x64.
 
It is true that I don't have tons and tons of 64-Bit apps, but the ones that I do have benefit. I'd say the biggest benefit for me would be the increased amount of RAM I can have with no problem.

Hmm...in Firefox, wouldn't extensions and such need to support x64 as well? Maybe I'm wrong.
 
The only real compatibility issues that exist are with drivers - you can't run 32bit drivers on a 64bit version of Windows and unsigned kernel mode drivers won't run on a 64bit version either. Luckily, most hardware has a 64bit driver available at this point and Windows has an extremely large database of drivers for older hardware. Also, as it was pointed out earlier, the 16bit compatibility layer was dropped completely and any applications that are using 16 bit code or have components that do will not work.

Personally though, I've been on a 64bit version of Windows since the initial release of Windows Vista and I've seen very few compatibility problems.
 
Here's a fun fact about Win7 64-bit: it comes with a 32-bit WMP and a 64-bit WMP, but only a 64-bit WMC.

If you run WMP or it opens up through some file association, you're getting the 32-bit WMP. Odd that they would insist on using the 32-bit version, yes? The reason for this is that various plugins (visualizations, etc) are specifically made for the 32-bit WMP. They will not work with the 64-bit version.

Now, WMC is essentially a fancy frontend for WMP. Since Win7 64-bit only has the 64-bit version of WMC, that means it's going to be using the 64-bit version of WMP underneath. So, any cool plugins that you installed and configured and tested in WMP first will not exist within WMC, because it's running the "other, better" version of WMP underneath.

The moral of the story is that the only visualization plugins that work with WMC in Win7 64-bit are the default ones that ship with WMP and haven't been updated since around 2001 :retard:
 
Heh, my Media Center is still hobbling by on Windows XP MCE 2005. I thought about moving it over to 7, but I use a lot of older emulators and plugins it probably wouldn't like. This is just another reason to keep it where it is.
 
The 9th Sage said:
Hmm...in Firefox, wouldn't extensions and such need to support x64 as well? Maybe I'm wrong.
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I think most of them are coded in JavaScript, and so can run on any platform that Firefox can. Of course this does make the JavaScript speed problem even worse, since not only is page JavaScript slow, but I've two dozen extensions and most of the GUI suffering from the same problem (Edit: Wait, am I getting confused with XML there? Either way, I'm pretty sure there's a lot of JavaScript going on). The difference between this and Google Chrome (where V8 does have an x64 backend) is night and day.

Also, my current user agent string:

Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux x86_64; en-GB; rv:1.9.2.3) Gecko/20100402 Iceweasel/3.6.3 (like Firefox/3.6.3)

So not strictly Firefox, but "like Firefox". Or as I put it "like Firefox, but without APNG because the libpng developers are bunch of egotistical bastards and the Debian developers are a bunch of complete fucking idiots for still considering their opinions to have any relevance whatsoever" (there are a lot of developers I've found myself hating in the last year or so).
 
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Lillymon said:
I think most of them are coded in JavaScript, and so can run on any platform that Firefox can.
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Oh, do'h. You're right I think. I guess I wasn't thinking too much there. Plug-ins are certainly a different story though, like Flash and Shockwave. I don't know if Adobe has x64 builds (haven't checked, actually).
 
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