Who else just installed windows 7 ? First Impressions

gooner99

Crackity Jones wrote: »

Upgraded from Vista. Really like the new taskbar and jump lists. 7 is definitely less resource hungry. Load up time from hibernate is better but cant see much improvement from startup. Well worth the €30

Sounds good.Can you tell me where you got it for €30 and what version it is?

Crackity Jones

gooner99 wrote: »

Sounds good.Can you tell me where you got it for €30 and what version it is?

Its the upgrade student offer from Microsoft (ultimate/pro/home pre). £30 actually so about €33. You need a valid student email.

leninbenjamin

Ricky91t wrote: »

Not many applications take advantage of 4gb of ram,Barely any applications I know of do tbh..

Almost all graphic design applications will benefit from more RAM. They tend to be very heavy on memory.

MATLAB and other number crunching programs should also benefit significantly (particularly if you have ever had to work with large sparse matrices).

Ricky91t

leninbenjamin wrote: »

Almost all graphic design applications will benefit from more RAM. They tend to be very heavy on memory.

MATLAB and other number crunching programs should also benefit significantly (particularly if you have ever had to work with large sparse matrices).

I've just posted from my experience,Using photoshop or lightroom for photography purposes,My 3gb or ram rarely jumps above 50%

mukki

windows 7 nightmare

my windows 7 dvd arrived thursday morning from amazon

that morning i had to go half way across the country for a wedding the next day, so have been in the hotel since with champagne, steaks, tons of beer, late nights, up early for the hotel's full irish breakfasts, then back to bed. I'm still drunk from last nights 8hrs drinking fallowed by donar kebabs

luckily i am off tomorrow to install windows 7 on my pc :-)

Woden

Was very smooth here I booted into the CD and installed. I formatted the main partition which took 10 seconds (one of those quick formats instead of the ones that could take hours?) and the installer took care of the rest.

Everything just worked which I thought was nice. Just reinstalling a few bits at the moment.

musiknonstop

Quite happy with Windows 7 although have lost Channel 4 in Media Center. Vista was able to pick it up from Analogue NTL no problem. Win7 won't let me enter the frequency manually.

JerryHispano

Running it on my 2 year old vaio since yesterday. Its faster doing everything, so . But i cant get drivers for the Fn functions like mute volume +- and brightness+- and the touch pad scroll and back/forward page. Sony still just have vista ones that dont work. Its not like they didn't see it coming!

dermo1990

Hi, I have a 2 year old laptop running vista home premium. Im wondering should my laptop be able to operate Windows 7 professional...heres the specs: 1.66GHz centrino Core 2 duo processor, 2GB ram, 128MB Nvidia GeForce 8400Gs M graphics, 120GB HDD.

leninbenjamin

Ricky91t wrote: »

I've just posted from my experience,Using photoshop or lightroom for photography purposes,My 3gb or ram rarely jumps above 50%

you're using a 32bit OS though aren't you? in that case the RAM usage for any application is capped at 2GB anyway, so you wouldn't see a difference regardless of whether the application might benefit from it or not.

dermo1990 wrote: »

Hi, I have a 2 year old laptop running vista home premium. Im wondering should my laptop be able to operate Windows 7 professional...heres the specs: 1.66GHz centrino Core 2 duo processor, 2GB ram, 128MB Nvidia GeForce 8400Gs M graphics, 120GB HDD.

the GFX card is weak, so it might struggle with some of the graphical features, but apart from that you'll be able to run it fine.

dermo1990

leninbenjamin wrote: »

you're using a 32bit OS though aren't you? in that case the RAM usage for any application is capped at 2GB anyway, so you wouldn't see a difference regardless of whether the application might benefit from it or not.



the GFX card is weak, so it might struggle with some of the graphical features, but apart from that you'll be able to run it fine.

Yes, I'm using a 32 bit system, and as far as I can tell vistas features seem to run smoothly enough with my gfx card. I assume it would be recommended to run a clean install since I'll be moving from vista home premium to 7 professional?

leninbenjamin

dermo1990 wrote: »

Yes, I'm using a 32 bit system, and as far as I can tell vistas features seem to run smoothly enough with my gfx card. I assume it would be recommended to run a clean install since I'll be moving from vista home premium to 7 professional?

An upgrade should go fine if you want to avoid the hassle of reinstalling everything, but I'd always recommend doing a clean install myself.

Outkast_IRE

leninbenjamin wrote: »

An upgrade should go fine if you want to avoid the hassle of reinstalling everything, but I'd always recommend doing a clean install myself.

agree with the clean install its the only way to go.

Dartz

I was just remembering how it was possibly to enable Aero and other Vista Premium features, on Vista Home Basic, just by tweaking entries in the registry using regedit.

I wonder if the same thing is possible with 7?

For all you 'law and ethics' nuts out there... I don't think there's anything in the EULA that specifically prevents you enabling those features... Like taking the restrictor out of a 33bhp bike-engine....

I suppose we'll find out soon enough.

It's not as if there're any Ultimate features I'd actually use, anyway.... I have Pro' from MSDNAA and it does what I need.

Except for Parking the HDD for 5 minutes at a time at random intervals, and hanging when it does.

Capt'n Midnight

Dartz wrote: »

For all you 'law and ethics' nuts out there... I don't think there's anything in the EULA that specifically prevents you enabling those features... Like taking the restrictor out of a 33bhp bike-engine....

Have you actually read an EULA ??
Remote desktop with things like VNC or logmein aren't strictly allowed.

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windows-7/eula.aspx - LOL



It was possible to bump Windows 2000 from workstation to server , and server to enterprise, with reg tweaks, a serious license breach

Dartz

Capt'n Midnight wrote: »

Have you actually read an EULA ??
Remote desktop with things like VNC or logmein aren't strictly allowed.

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windows-7/eula.aspx - LOL



It was possible to bump Windows 2000 from workstation to server , and server to enterprise, with reg tweaks, a serious license breach

Link just comes up as 'coming soon'.

Vista one mentions ' not working around technical limitations' alright, so I assume it's the same thing in 7 I did read it when I installed... but the thing is.. does modifying the registry using a tool provided for the purpose count as 'working around a technical limitation', or is this more a DRM thing?

Or both.

Working around a technical limitation, I'dve thought, would be more outright modifying and cracking the software code itself, like disabling WGA.

But anyway, in my mind it's no different from renabling a disabled feature in hardware with a soldering iron and a bit of guts/intellect/luck. Technically you're not supposed to modify your car either... but that never stopped anyone. But that's an argument for an other day...

thebman

Dartz wrote: »

Link just comes up as 'coming soon'.

Vista one mentions ' not working around technical limitations' alright, so I assume it's the same thing in 7 I did read it when I installed... but the thing is.. does modifying the registry using a tool provided for the purpose count as 'working around a technical limitation', or is this more a DRM thing?

Or both.

Working around a technical limitation, I'dve thought, would be more outright modifying and cracking the software code itself, like disabling WGA.

But anyway, in my mind it's no different from renabling a disabled feature in hardware with a soldering iron and a bit of guts/intellect/luck. Technically you're not supposed to modify your car either... but that never stopped anyone. But that's an argument for an other day...

Usually you have to modify a tool to move them up versions I think. I know you did with XP, it wasn't a straight forward reg hack but with something like resource hacker you can usually do it using the original file and not have to download another file.

Probably technically illegal but then doing anything with software seems to be against the law these days.

I never bothered doing it because it seemed like a lot of hassle I didn't need.

mukki

installed windows 7 on my mediacenter this morning

i found the channels much easier to set up 2xfreesat and 2x analogue, but i had a better idea what i was doing this time

much faster to renumber delete channels, vista used to take 2-5 mins per change 7 is instant

resumes divx downloads

plays and resumes divx downloads on an extender

Outkast_IRE

lets keep it on topic : new installers of windows 7 whats your first impressions

leninbenjamin

I finally got round to installing Windows 7 today. Performance was the main thing i was looking for but I see little to no difference between 7 and Vista.

Apart from that there are some nice refinements on the GUI, but overall i see very little reason to update from Vista.

Had a bit of hassle installing my printer on it. Mainly Dell's fault. They have the driver's on their site, but the installer craps out because it wants to overwrite an existing installation.

Paulw

Well, I've been running Windows 7 now for almost a week. I do think it's faster and performs better than Vista.

Anyway, today I had my first blue screen in years. I wasn't even at the PC when it happened. Information in the Event Viewer wasn't of much use, but a report was submitted to Microsoft anyway. I'm not too worried.

I really do like Windows 7 over Vista.

Sandvich

axer wrote: »

Actually Vista was not a bad operating system but the public perception of it was bad from the start. I knew so many people out there who criticised Vista until they started using it after which nearly all said they liked the enhancements.

There was so many people giving out about the UAC when in fact it is a great idea to bring in. People just don't like being disturbed but the problem is that in order to have a secure system you have to be disturbed. The option was there to turn it off if they didn't want it.

Alot of the problems with Vista were with badly written 3rd party drivers. Vista has much better error and driver handling than XP but because XP is much more mature it naturally had better drivers written for it.

I have vista home premium on my laptop and in the next week or two I will be putting Windows 7 premium on it.

The UAC was mostly an attempt to copy the similar system most Linux distros and Unix based OSes have but far more obnoxious.

There are so many things I hate about Vista. Like the search function. Oh ****ing hell. I have to type in a random stream of characters, then go in, stop the search, select the option, turn off indexing and select not to searched indexed areas because windows is too stupid to realise I have it turned off, type in what I'm looking for again and restart the search just to be safe(For instance I was searching for "Umineko" files on my harddrive, and it loaded up the game instead, I'd also have to to the same thing when house cleaning and looking for files over 99 megs). I hope this changes in 7.

Vista is a nightmare because it's sluggish and awkward. It takes me longer to do things than it did in XP no matter how used to it I get. Horrible.

Bob_Harris

I see printing in Windows 7 is as retarded as previous versions.

Is it too hard to have an option to "Print actual size".

I mean, I've gone to the bother of resizing the image to an exact size in CM or INCH or whatever, then I go to print the image using Windows and it only allows me select from 7 predefined sizes.

Rej

run_Forrest_run wrote: »

I have a laptop (2.5 years old) running XP media edition with 1Gb RAM, would it be worth my time installing Windows 7 on that or should I just wait until I upgrade my laptop (in about 2 years time:( )

I have the opposite dilema... I bought a new laptop with vista pre-installed, and its a complete nightmare - a lot of my programs dont work properly and I am having to do all kinds of mad worarounds. So my question is, should I downgrade it to XP or wait for windows 7?

BostonB

I'm guessing you installed Vista as an upgrade over XP rather than a fresh install?

Sorry I re-read what you posted.

What apps are you having a problem with?

Tillotson

FFS, moving C:\Users to it's own partition is still neigh on impossible

Backup and restore doesn't seem to work if you have a non-Microsoft boot-loader.

Other than that it's a fine OS

ScumLord

Rej wrote: »

I have the opposite dilema... I bought a new laptop with vista pre-installed, and its a complete nightmare - a lot of my programs dont work properly and I am having to do all kinds of mad worarounds. So my question is, should I downgrade it to XP or wait for windows 7?

Windows 7 is pretty good for getting drivers. You just plug in a device and it goes off and finds a driver for it and get's it working. I just plugged my phone in for the first time since the reinstall and it went off and found the driver and associated software. The only driver it didn't find was the wireless network card.

flyswatter

ScumLord wrote: »

Windows 7 is pretty good for getting drivers. You just plug in a device and it goes off and finds a driver for it and get's it working. I just plugged my phone in for the first time since the reinstall and it went off and found the driver and associated software. The only driver it didn't find was the wireless network card.

I found Vista to be similarly good at getting drivers. So thats not something thats any different from Vista.

leninbenjamin

Tillotson wrote: »

FFS, moving C:\Users to it's own partition is still neigh on impossible

Backup and restore doesn't seem to work if you have a non-Microsoft boot-loader.

Other than that it's a fine OS

you move the folders in the user folder
i.e. C:\Users\<Username>\*

and it works fine.

Capt'n Midnight

Rej wrote: »

I have the opposite dilema... I bought a new laptop with vista pre-installed, and its a complete nightmare - a lot of my programs dont work properly and I am having to do all kinds of mad worarounds. So my question is, should I downgrade it to XP or wait for windows 7?

Which version of VISTA do you have ?
Business versions allow downground rights to XP, so zero cost

Programs that don't work with VISTA probably won't work with Windows 7 , yes there is an XP compatiblity mode in windows 7 but it's not as compatible as XP


But in any event the first port of call is the vendors website, check if the apps are supproted on windows 7 , have you installed any patches for them etc. ?