so i tried windows 7

[stlouis1]

so i built a box last night to try out windows 7. i think i picked the wrong hardware. i have no network, no audio, no display driver. i thought id at least have network drivers and i could get the rest from there. i have both the 32bit and 64bit, i may slap a second 4th hard drive in one of my main rigs and try the 64 bit there.

but from what i can see, aside from the slow loading of the setup before actually installing, which is fine, its beta. but it looks to me like its more what vista should have been. its kind of nice, a little more simple, i like the fact that they got rid of the sidebar, i hated that thing, now the widgets or whatever MS calls them are more integrated, which is nice if you use them.

but i kind of like it, as far as windows goes, its not bad, hopefully in the near future i can get a more functional install of it going and toy around some more, but my first impressions are good

[jdrom17]

What kind of old ass hardware are you running? :p

Found all the major stuff for my Desktop and Laptop (other than sound on my desktop and the fingerprint reader on my laptop). Using Windows 7 x64 if that matters.

[stlouis1]

lol, uh, pentium 4 3.2 northwood. 1gb ram, p4r800-vm mobo and radeon 9550......nothing too old, im pretty sure it should far exceed the minimum requirements

edit// just downloaded the XP network driver from the asus site, got me online to update the other drivers, well, theres no driver for the radeon, but chipset and everything else work, nic was updated again too

[jdrom17]

lol, uh, pentium 4 3.2 northwood. 1gb ram, p4r800-vm mobo and radeon 9550......nothing too old, im pretty sure it should far exceed the minimum requirements

edit// just downloaded the XP network driver from the asus site, got me online to update the other drivers, well, theres no driver for the radeon, but chipset and everything else work, nic was updated again too
lol I wouldn't be running Windows 7 on a P4 or with only 1GB RAM...

[stlouis1]

maybe you wouldnt be......but it actually runs fine, very smooth believe it or not. aside from the lack of display driver. i can only imagine how well it runs on better hardware considering how smooth it runs on here. i wish i have a p4c series mobo though, maybe one of those pentium m adapters that asus made, got a couple of those chips kicking around here

and i did get it to bluescreen trying to use media player, apparently media player has a problem with the audio driver i got from windows update

i may install it on the mothers laptop, find out what she thinks, its nice for me to have it on a system beside me, but i have 3 more systems beside me, i probly wont use it

[jdrom17]

maybe you wouldnt be......but it actually runs fine, very smooth believe it or not. aside from the lack of display driver. i can only imagine how well it runs on better hardware considering how smooth it runs on here. i wish i have a p4c series mobo though, maybe one of those pentium m adapters that asus made, got a couple of those chips kicking around here

and i did get it to bluescreen trying to use media player, apparently media player has a problem with the audio driver i got from windows update
Interesting. Maybe I'll try it out on my dad's laptop (P4 2.4GHz, ATI Radeon 9000, 512MB RAM) since it can run a lite Vista okay.

[Avid6eek]

The system requirements for Windows 7 will actually be lower than what they were for Vista. It is slightly leaner and runs much smoother with less advanced hardware.

[BAM!]

what did they do to the side bar? i like the widgets on my sidebar and i can't live without them!

[stlouis1]

the widgets are still there, but now they're integrated into the desktop, not the sidebar, more like mac (i think) or kde 4 for linux, so you'll still have your widgets, just without the sidebar

[Evil 8 Ball]

what did they do to the side bar? i like the widgets on my sidebar and i can't live without them!

I actually like the fact you just drag the ones you want to use out in Windows 7.

So far, I've found Windows 7 very straight forward to use. Installed quickly and seems to run well enough. Only driver it couldn't install was for my X-Fi sound card.

I have a feeling I'll be buying Windows 7 when it comes out (Maybe not straight away).

[Devils00Champs]

only thing i dont like so far about win7 is gadgets wont work with UAC turned off.

[stlouis1]

may the gadgets have a security hole in them?

all in all though, so far i think it looks good, MS must have sent their co-op kids back to school, and brought in some real coders

[Devils00Champs]

A short performance review of Beta 1 by bit-tech
http://www.bit-tech.net/bits/software/2009/01/16/windows-7-beta-performance/1

[stlouis1]

If people are too stupid to learn this simple technique then remove their keyboard and mouse, and then their car keys and passport as well.

beautiful, i love it

wow, i just started looking at the benchmarks in that article, win7 falls behind quite a bit in some tests. i remember reading a blog on the MS site about talking about windows 7 and performance. something about actual performance and perceived performance. now im not so sure if windows 7 is smoother, or feels smoother, lol

and again i quote
Windows 7 is supposed to be much more lightweight, too, and we've seen it running on Atom-based machines without too much trouble. We've obviously tested here with an incredibly high-end system and so the performance differences may not be as noticeable at this end of the spectrum. Where the optimisations might make more of a telling difference is at the lower end of the scale, where hardware performance is very much the bottleneck of your experience with an operating system like Windows Vista or Windows 7.

theres a good reason to use older hardware for testing new OS'....like i am ;)

[Devils00Champs]

I personally expected a beta of win7 to be slower in most tests, or close to vista, but in close to half the test win7 is a lot faster then vista already. for example in the decompression tests, file copy, and boot speed. Im not counting the game benchmarking, those i attribute to early graphic drivers lowering the performance.
As 7 matures, as these early tests show, its easy to assume its going to a lot faster and smoother overall then vista.