Windows 7

tfdesign · 8 Nov 2009, 12:40

Good news is that it runs better than Snow leopard on a Mac.

I find that quite hard to believe. Do you have the evidence or a link for this? Can we see it? Or is it just another urban myth? I have XP SP3 installed on this Macbook Pro. It's okay but not brilliant. Video mirroring is a dog, but works like a dream with OS X. Leopard, which is where I am coming from here, works wonderfully. I haven't yet upgraded to Snow Leopard. My HP WX4300 workstation runs pretty well with XP SP3. I have been thinking of upgrading to W7, but I think the W7 interface looks ghastly! Having to sit there to work getting used to another operating system, well I need to work, and simply don't have the time. My brother-in-law, who is a windows application programmer, says that W7 is just hacked Vista, so that guy, who mentioned the same thing, earlier in this thread was right. We are being conned!

I'm sticking with XP for the meantime. What has W7 got that XP doesn't have already? And all those stories of "well it didn't work and now it is working" fills me with all that classic Microsoft, screaming heebeegeebee nonsense, all over again.

As the saying goes, "if it ain't broke, don't fix it!".

Ecuadorian · 8 Nov 2009, 15:46

Totally agree with you. If something is working for you, keep it.

On a related note, I have just had my first huge Duh! moment with Windows 7. I left it rendering a sky in Vue last night and this morning the PC seemed to have been turned off. I forgot to check the energy saving settings.

charly2008 · 15 Nov 2009, 13:27

Hi,

Two days ago I installed Windows 7 Ultimate x86, 32bit on my laptop, an Acer Aspire 9302 with an AMD Turion 64 Mobile and 2Gb Memory and a Nvidia GeForce Go 6100.

First i went to get all Vista drivers from Acer and installed it. All drivers seem to be compatible with Windows 7. The installation went off without any problems.
Then I installed the programs, Sketchup 7 with many plugins and Kerkythea and an old version of Paint Shop Pro Version 5. And also Photoshop CS3. All these programs run flawlessly until now.

In Windows 7, I choose the classic desktop view and I've turned off all visual effects. Now the desktop looks almost like in XP. Until that time I had not found new things, apart from the revised menu structure and the structure of the control panel. My first impression is like new wine in old bottles.

The first problem occurred yesterday. My wireless LAN connection worked flawlessly. Then I changed the partition size and after a restart no connection could be established. I tried everything from what I knew from XP, but without success. The diagnostic tool is just as unhelpful as it was in XP.

Today when I turned on the laptop, the connection was restored.

My initial experience is that they can orient themselves relatively quickly in Windows 7 if you have experience with XP. But advantages over XP, I can not see at this time.

For the time being I will continue to work with XP on my Desktop PC. Maybe someone will find the advantages of Windows 7 sometime.

notareal · 15 Nov 2009, 13:47

I like:

Aero UI
Search
Backup and restore
Media center
Far more stable than Vista (not a great deal when comparing to XP)

There are also some entreprise features that do promise a lot

DirectAccess
Federated Search
BitLocker

remus · 15 Nov 2009, 17:15

Id also give a big thumbs up to the search in windows 7 (and vista for that matter.) Use it so often that i dont even think about it any more. Its a massive improvement over xp.

tomot · 15 Nov 2009, 18:17

@tomot said:

My experience with Windows 7 Ultimate: I Installed it on an Acer AOD250 netbook:

Can't find and install the following:

WiFi

The price of Netbooks is ridiculously low: .... $300.00 at Costco:
and I finally made some progress, I hope the following info helps those that have Wifi problems with Windows 7 install on their Acer AOD250.

goto: http://www.radarsync.com/drivers/d16103 ... rk_adapter
download : WLAN_Win7_Win7-64(8.0.0.144).zip file. (its the 4th item on the list)

honoluludesktop · 15 Nov 2009, 19:51

Can't you reset file preference in the same way as WinXP? My Computer > Tools > Folder Options > File Types menu. My copy of WinXP, opens a menu that includes the task manager. Assuming that Motiva ran in 32 bit WinXp, how does it fail? Does Win7 have a r. click on "program icon" menu that has a compatibilities tab?

remus · 15 Nov 2009, 21:14

@ecuadorian said:

Ctrl+Alt+Delete shows a window with options instead of simply opening the task manager.

ctrl-shift-escape to get straight to the task manager

Ecuadorian · 15 Nov 2009, 22:02

Thank you, Remus.

Hey, SOAP is now working in my Windows 7 installation.

Short story
Go here:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/resultsForProduct.aspx?displaylang=en&productID=9C954C37-1ED1-4846-8A7D-85FC422D1388
Download and run the "DirectX End-User Runtime". It will download and install some "additional components".

Long story
The problem was that DirectX 10 has no backwards compatibility. The file I linked to will download and install previous versions of the DirectX SDK, including some dating back to 2007. Bottom line: SOAP now works!

tfdesign · 15 Nov 2009, 22:12

@remus said:

Id also give a big thumbs up to the search in windows 7 (and vista for that matter.) Use it so often that i dont even think about it any more. Its a massive improvement over xp.

The search function had to get better, because Spotlight (Apple's search) in Mac OS X, which has been present since 2005, is so fast. A very good move indeed (because XP's search is so ****! )

Interestingly, did you folks read this article by any chance?;

Access Denied

(www.telegraph.co.uk)

I did read the original article/ web page too, but I think that page must have been pulled by Microsoft (which isn't really surprising)

TIG · 15 Nov 2009, 22:37

Search is still nothing on baregrep http://www.baremetalsoft.com/?app=BareGrep&ver=3.50a&build=2006-11-02 ...

Ecuadorian · 16 Nov 2009, 03:46

Coming from XP Pro 32-bit, these are the things I like about Windows 7 Pro 64-bits:

I can now use all of my RAM.
I measured a 14% speed increase in rendering with Twilight on a Core i5 Lynnfield CPU. This might be particular to Lynnfield CPUs, as I read somewhere that they were designed for Windows 7.
Seeking in VideoMach (a video editor I use) is smoother.
Easy to put two windows side by side. This was a pain to do in XP when you had more than those two windows open.
Each program icon in the task bar (and also those pinned to the Start menu) has a "Jump list" of recent and pinned documents for that particular program.
Fonts are now antialiased.
Search totally rocks.
The new Windows Live Movie Maker is much more stable, easy to use and handy than the one in XP. It even has direct upload to YouTube.

Things I don't like about Windows 7 Pro 64, again coming from XP Pro 32. (perhaps you can give me a hand with some of these):

Previews for SketchUp in Windows Explorer are gone.
Motiva SOAP and Motiva RealCamera are not working, not even in the XP virtual machine. [SOLVED, thanks Microsoft!]
GIF files are opened by Internet Explorer instead of the Windows Image Viewer, and I can't find how to change this. [SOLVED]
Ctrl+Alt+Delete shows a window with options instead of simply opening the task manager. [SOLVED, thanks, Remus!]
Internet Explorer 64-bits has no Adobe Flash plug-in for it. Well, this doesn't really matter as there is a 32-bit version and I use other browsers most of the time.

Something I find weird is that SketchUp works better with Aero than without it.

Ecuadorian · 16 Nov 2009, 03:50

Update: I have solved three of my five "Things I don't like about Windows 7", one of them thanks to Remus. The GIF problem was solved in a big Duh! moment. I had already tried the "Right click > Open with" trick, but I could not find the Windows Photo Viewer in the program list. It turns out I had to press a little triangle to show the full list:

After pressing it, I saw and selected Windows Photo Viewer. Duh!

Out of the two remaining gripes I had with Windows 7, one must be solved by Google (the 64-bit extension shell for displaying previews in Windows Explorer) and the other one is irrelevant, as I said. This means I'll be using exclusively Windows 7 from now on, and that I plan to delete the XP partition sometime in the future, when I get tired of the dual boot startup screen.

Oh, and tfdesign, my first impression of Windows 7 was that it had borrowed some tricks from Ubuntu Jaunty.

remus · 18 Nov 2009, 16:13

Couple of other really cool things about windows 7: it opens zip files natively, it can burn .iso files to disc natively and it doesnt blank out the screen when your watching a full screen video. Small things but all very useful to me.

Rich O Brien · 18 Nov 2009, 17:57

I got a virus last night on a fresh install of Win7 64bit? Must have sneaked on to a memory stick in work and carried it home. At least that is the only option i can think of?

nuaha.exe was the name

Avast caught before it did anything but i'm still not convinced it's totally gone. But that's just paranoia creeping out!

Anyone got suggestions on making sure its gone and how to sort out the stick?

I know i've gone off topic but didn't want to create new thread for this

I'm lovong Win7 by the way, although XP i feel is still King

Ecuadorian · 18 Nov 2009, 19:14

Some viruses can respawn when you boot Windows again. To make sure it's gone, try booting Ubuntu from a Live CD, look for the virus location and kill it.

After my last nasty encounter with a virus that came in a cousin's USB stick (I was using no antivirus at the time... Duh!), I bought ESET antivirus and have had no more problems. The worst a virus can do now is freeze the PC, but ESET will block it before it leaves "spores" behind.

tfdesign · 19 Nov 2009, 12:22

@remus said:

Couple of other really cool things about windows 7: it opens zip files natively, it can burn .iso files to disc natively and it doesnt blank out the screen when your watching a full screen video. Small things but all very useful to me.

Again, another set of features that us Mac users have enjoyed (with a right mouse or contextual click) for years.

In order to run W7 I'm going to have to upgrade both my PC and my Mac, because both my machines won't support it.

remus · 19 Nov 2009, 12:36

Im willing to bet they were supported on a linux distro long before they were part of a mac os, although its somewhat beside the point. Theyre improvements over xp and vista and thus an improvement in the OS i use, and to be honest thats all i really care about

Ecuadorian · 19 Nov 2009, 21:11

Remus, XP came with native zip support, called "compressed folder". ZIP archives are treated as any other folder but have a special icon.
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/306531
http://www.microsoft.com/resources/documentation/windows/xp/all/proddocs/en-us/vz_ovrvw.mspx?mfr=true
This is the very reason why Chris Fullmer hates RAR and loves ZIP.

XP also had native "drag and drop" CD burning.

@unknownuser said:

Saving critical information to a CD is as easy as saving to a floppy disk or hard disk. By selecting a folder of software, photos, or even music and dragging it to the CD-R device icon, you can create your own CDs.

http://www.microsoft.com/hk/windowsxp/home/features.mspx

ISO burning seems to be new, however.

Back to Windows 7, another feature I'm really liking is its ability to become "suspended" and not lose that state even if you completely cut the power from the computer. It will even continue rendering after you re-plug and wake up the machine. This has come as a lifesaver right now that there are frequent blackouts here; my UPS gives me enough time to set the PC in suspended state and then I can turn everything off, even the UPS itself, knowing that nothing will be lost. Perhaps this feature was present in previous Windows versions and I'm about to receive a big "Duh!" here. As I almost never "suspended" XP and never used Vista, I'm not sure.

notareal · 20 Nov 2009, 09:54

Suspend has been a part of windows features since Windows 95. Early days it had some serious limitations, but it did work with suitable hardware.