Has anybody tried Windows 7 yet?

aimeeandbeatles

aimeeandbeatles

watermelon
Joined
Apr 5, 2007
Messages
20,112
Now that Windows 7 is in beta, I'm wondering if anyone here has tried it. If so, how is it?
 
I'm running it right now.

Had never used vista, but figured I'd give it a try. So far, I find it fairly stable (no BSODs that I can actually attribute to Windows - blame Dawn Of War II instead), and can get most software and hardware running for me (and in fact, it was easier to get my wireless adapter working under windows 7 than it is under XP).

I like quite a lot of the features. There are a few issues that I think can be improved, but on the whole I'm reasonably impressed. It appears to be relatively fast / responsive, doesn't really appear to be much of a resource hog.
 
I tried it. It seems decently stable (although I did get a couple of crashes including a BSOD due to nVIDIA graphics drivers), and does the best job at getting drivers of any version of Windows I've seen, although the generic audio drivers it found were of pretty sorry quality. Software seems to work better than it did in Vista - one game that refused to install on Vista works fine on Win7, and another that had serious graphical glitches in Vista doesn't in Win7, although its performance is noticeably worse than XP. I got a corrupted save in Civ3 very quickly after trying it, however, so I don't trust Windows 7 to run Civ3 perfectly. Vista had major save-game issues for me with Civ3, so I'm keeping all my Civ3 playing, especially for the Stories and Tales section, on XP. So software compatibility is better than Vista, but worse than XP. Stability/drivers is similar to Vista at this point - if my audio were supported on Win7, it probably would sound better. Stability is worse than XP; drivers are worse than XP but it's much better at finding the drivers for you. It's excellent there really.

Resources usage is a mixed bag. 64-bit Win7 uses more memory than 32-bit Vista, 32-bit seems to use less. But Windows 7 tends to hit my hard drive like crazy, especially for the first 10 minutes or so after it starts up. Rather annoying, and I don't recall Vista doing that - XP definitely doesn't. So in resource usage I have to put it below Vista and XP, at least on my comptuer.

The features I generally like. Most of them seem to add to the experience. I miss the Windows Media Player toolbar, though. Many of them you can achieve through free third-party programs in earlier versions of Windows. On the whole, though, the feature set is the best yet, which should be expected.

But I've switched back to XP and plan to stick with XP (although I do still have Windows 7 installed). With the choice of excellent stability, drivers, and program support, along with low resource usage, versus the mostly improved features of Windows 7, I'll definitely take what XP offers. But if I still had Vista, I'd definitely rather be running Windows 7. It's definitely an improvement over Vista. And if I had gotten a laptop with Windows 7 on it, I might not have switched back to XP - dependent on how Civ3 had agreed with it.

It varies on what you do of course. If you have a video card that can take advantage of DX10 (in practice, not just having minimal support for it), and like Aero (I find XP's graphics more pleasing generally), and don't run into any application compatibility problems, then you may like Windows 7. But then you'll most likely like Vista (although Vista is worse in compatibility). 7 is basically an improved version of Vista, likely to convince a decent number of Vista users to upgrade and likely to reduce the number of people switching back to XP by a decent amount, but if you switched back to XP from Vista because of not liking Vista, you'll probably want to keep running XP.
 
Somebody I know says that Windows 7 worked better on slightly older computers (such as my 2006 one), unlike Vista which made a lot of people mad. I hope that makes sense.

EDIT: Let me try again -- what I meant is, somebody I know tried the beta version and said it runs smoothly on computers built for XP, unlike Vista.
 
Well, a lot of people were pissed when Vista first came out, especially those upgrading their XP boxes.
 
aimeeandbeatles said:
Well, a lot of people were pissed when Vista first came out, especially those upgrading their XP boxes.
Click to expand...

A lot of people upgrading their Windows 3.1 boxes to Windows 95 were pissed.

A lot of people upgrading their Windows 95 boxes to Windows 98 were pissed.

A lot of people upgrading their Windows 98 boxes to Windows Me were pissed.

A lot of people upgrading their Windows 98 boxes to Windows XP were pissed.

I would recommend to people not to upgrade their operating system on their old computers.
 
ME was an utter failure though.

Vista did have a lot of problems though, and still does have compatability issues even if a lot of it's early problems are fixed, and it's image has been ruined. There isn't a real advantage to switch to it anyways from XP.

I am interested in Windows 7 though, but I dislike that it will probably cost like $200 (CAD, I would assume) or something which is a bit much. Plus I'm not getting rid of XP :p I'll keep XP on a drive/comp for ever so I can play all my non- DX10 games on it.
 
PrinceScamp said:
Vista did have a lot of problems though, and still does have compatability issues even if a lot of it's early problems are fixed, and it's image has been ruined. There isn't a real advantage to switch to it anyways from XP.
Click to expand...

I thought that you could use more than 4 gigs of RAM in Vista? (At least the 64-bit.)
 
Well, nowadays, sometimes computers do things so fast you want to slow them down! :crazyeye:
 
Abgar said:
That's the dumbist thing I ever heard.
Click to expand...

No, seriously. Sometimes I have to use a program to take up a chunk of the CPU cycles to run some older games without them going crazy at the highest speed, such as SimCity 2000. And my CD drive runs so fast it makes a huge amount of noise, so I'm currently trying to figure out how to slow that down. :scan:
 
aimeeandbeatles said:
Somebody I know says that Windows 7 worked better on slightly older computers (such as my 2006 one), unlike Vista which made a lot of people mad. I hope that makes sense.

EDIT: Let me try again -- what I meant is, somebody I know tried the beta version and said it runs smoothly on computers built for XP, unlike Vista.
Click to expand...

Slightly. It seems to handle 512 MB of RAM better, at least the 32-bit version. It'll shrink down quite nicely and use less than 400 MB of RAM in that case. Although it wouldn't have been that much of an issue if it had behaved similarly to Vista, since hardware has now caught up with Vista.

Zelig said:
It's faster.
Click to expand...

In some cases. Give it the wPrime CPU test, and it'll probably come out faster - so will Vista. But not everything will. Halo of all games is considerably slower in Win7 than XP. I'm sure there are lots of others if you measured the frame rate - that one I noticed without any frame rate tool and merely confirmed with one.

It does tend to do well on large-scale tests of overall speed, though.

aimeeandbeatles said:
Well, nowadays, sometimes computers do things so fast you want to slow them down! :crazyeye:
Click to expand...

True. I have several old games with the same problem - they were designed for a Pentium II and ran fast on a Pentium 4, let alone a Core 2. And some games even crash if your computer is too fast (Sim Copter is the worst offender I've run into). Cap your CPU to 600 MHz or 800 MHz, and they play great. But you're going to want something other than a bloated operating system to slow your system down. I use RightMarkCPUClockUtility - it slows down the clock so I don't have to burn through all the CPU cycles with some CPU cycle program and create tons of heat in the process.

Ideally of course the programs would have been made to not be clock-cycle dependent, but unfortunately not all were.

As for the CD drive, you might try switching it to PIO mode, but beware that that makes it really slow. It could just be the disc, too - for whatever reason my CD drive is 5 times as loud when it has the Civ3 Vanilla disc in as almost any other disc. Same with DVD's with tons of tiny files.
 
Quintillus said:
In some cases. Give it the wPrime CPU test, and it'll probably come out faster - so will Vista. But not everything will. Halo of all games is considerably slower in Win7 than XP. I'm sure there are lots of others if you measured the frame rate - that one I noticed without any frame rate tool and merely confirmed with one.

It does tend to do well on large-scale tests of overall speed, though.
Click to expand...

I was referring to Vista being faster than XP.

Vista is far better than XP at handling many multithreaded applications and large amounts of RAM.
 
However, if you only have a low-end XP box (or god forbid, a Windows 9x box!), Vista wouldn't be much help.
 
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