Windows 7
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Thank you for your concern, Pentti. I'm not experiencing any more problems. As I said, the problem was that I had chosen the "classic windows" theme, and apparently no one tested it during the beta phase.
I'm now using the default theme with zero problems. Sounds weird, but with computers nothing can be too weird.So the problem was not VLC. Actually, it's working perfectly fine. When I ran the upgrade advisor from XP VLC even had a certificate of compatibility:
My Intel motherboard has no onboard video. I rely solely on my GeForce 9600GT, which the same upgrade advisor lists as compatible with Windows 7 and which nvidia's site lists as recommended for Windows 7.
Thank you for your recommendation of 7zip, I was thinking of ditching WinRAR for something lighter.
I searched all over the Net for people with problems with several nvidia cards and Windows 7, and there are hundreds of thousands of results with BSOD problems. They must have chosen the same Windows theme as I did.
EDIT: I finally found the correct Keyboard setting. It's "España - Internacional". The reason why it was failing before was that Windows now has a "default keyboard setting" option, so it kept changing to the default every time I switched to another program.
Now I've killed all settings except the one that actually works. -
Looks like latest VLC has fixed the Windows 7 issues.
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Now that I remember, something else I did right before my BSOD problems started was install a new graphics driver from Windows Update. Now I've gotten rid of it and I'm using the one that came with Windows 7, without upgrading it. Perhaps the new driver is buggy.
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OK, guys, yet another update.
Some more experimentation revealed that indeed the driver that Windows Update downloaded and the one downloaded directly from NVIDIA are both buggy and cause BSOD problems. So I had to use the vanilla one that comes with Windows 7. I had no problems, but SketchUp viewport performance was very poor, especially when activating Aero.
Then, while searching for something else in my drawers, I found the disc that came with the graphics card, installed the Vista 64-bit driver (worked fine in Win7), and now I have superb SketchUp viewport performance and Aero.
Duh!
However, some things are still not working. Namely, Motiva software, which is GPU-heavy. I'll keep XP for the time being but now I'm ready to start working in Windows 7.
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Did you try this beta driver?
http://www.nvidia.com/object/win7_winvista_64bit_195.39_beta.htmlIncludes over 200 bug fixes. Refer to the release notes on the documentation tab for information about the key bug fixes in this release.
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Thanks, Pentti. Downloading now...
It says "English". I hope in works in my Windows 7 Pro Spanish version (Could not find the Ultimate version ) -
@solo said:
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!".
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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.
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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.
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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
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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.
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@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)
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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?
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@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
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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! -
@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?;
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/microsoft/6564111/Microsoft-Windows-7-based-on-Mac-OS-X.html
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)
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Search is still nothing on
baregrephttp://www.baremetalsoft.com/?app=BareGrep&ver=3.50a&build=2006-11-02 ... -
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.
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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.
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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.
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