Windows 7

ok, what microsoft calls their 'release candidate' for windows 7 is on their website. anyone can download it and install it. it's currently free... until june, 2010. yup, free to use until then. but, you can read all the details of that here: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/ev...PID=wcfeed .

what i wanted to mention was that i've seen it now and used it a tiny bit. one of the local retail computer stores had it installed on several machines in the store. this thing is pretty slick and according to the salesman i was talking to, is more stable than XP Pro. that would be nice. he demonstrated to me some of the features of the new system. the first thing i noticed and commented on was, 'this looks like mac o/s/gui.'. he agreed, but also showed me some tricks that make it even a touch better than the mac interface. it was fairly impressive.

i also asked him about compatibility to existing software i own that was designed to run under XP. this is where i noticed a bit of hesitation on his part, but, there is, apparently, a 'compatability mode' you can run in to help with that. and he mentioned, right along with the compatibility issue, the driver issue of any new release. he said he had an HP printer that wouldnt run under windows 7 at first. but, he just entered administrator mode and told the printer to run anyways, and it did. now, i didnt understand exactly what he did there, but apparently microsoft has learned a couple things about compatibility issues through all the years of headaches in dealing with all this.

so, as much as i wanted to not come away with liking this new windows o/s, i actually came away fairly impressed. it comes in 32 bit or 64 bit mode. the 64 bit systems can handle a lot more ram and that's what i'm currently looking at going to. my current 32 bit XP system just cant handle my large system ram needs that well. i keep getting memory crashes from working with large files and large undo's.

the new o/s has a much smaller ram footprint, also. it only eats a gig of ram, roughly, where vista was eating as much as two. that shld help. it seemed very smooth, very professional and i'm seriously tempted to go out and build a new rig. i can get a nice quad core i7 with 6 megs of ram, a terrabyte drive, a gigabyte nvidia video card and 64 bit vista, for about $1500 (without monitor). on that, i could then download the release candidate and try it all out.

it's really quite interesting to me my impressions of the various operating systems microsoft has come out with over the years and how those impressions panned out once i had actually tried the thing. with windows 3.1 i simply laughed the first time i tried it. 'this is a joke, right?'. with windows 95, ok, things looked a little better, but i still like my Amiga FAR better!. by the time windows98 came out, Commodore had died and i was forced into the pc market. and 98 was ok, but seemed buggy and prone to crashing quite a bit. it was better and i still have it installed on one machine, but i would never have called it 'professional'. i never had win2k or the other idiot FAT system one, so cant speak to those much. i have used win2k a bit here and there, and it seemed pretty stable, but the other one i stayed away from as it seemed to be a total joke. XP i had mixed feelings over but liked it, mostly. it was more stable than win98, by a long shot and more versatile and fixed the whole sloppy FAT 32 issue, which was eating up harddrives like crazy. so, i mostly liked XP and that's what i still use. Vista, no thanks. very sloppy, rushed out the door, a true system hog and nasty compatibility issues. so, here we are with a new release coming out and i'm already fairly well impressed and i dont even have the thing; i just tried it out in the store!

so, that's my impression on the new windows. i have hope that maybe microsoft has finally put it all together in a much cleaner, much more stable o/s. i say 'hope', because, again, i dont actually have the thing yet, have only used it in the store, and only have the salesman's own impressions of it and my tiny experience with it, to go by. but, as a first impression, i actually found myself somewhat excited about this and that hasnt happened for a LONG while with windows and microsoft. let's just hope the first impression pans out

thanks, garbanzo. good to see my impressions have some substance with someone actually using it

I've been using Win7 beta and then RC, both 64-bit, as my primary OS at home. It's fantastic -- IMO, it's the best Microsoft OS to date.

vlad, i'm glad to hear you say that. again, it confirms what i saw and what the store guy was telling me. good to know.

jffe, stability is better than xp. it's almost as big a jump as going from win98 to winxp in stability. plus, it operates in 64 bit much better than any other 64 bit o/s from microsoft, and that means the 3 gig limit on system ram is now opened up. i've seen rigs selling now with 8 gigs of ram, and that's in the store. online, you could probably order 16 gigs.

if you could get one, imagine that with a flash harddrive as your c: drive, imagine turning on the computer and you're instantly in win7, no bootup time to speak of. you have 8 gigs of ram and a two-terrabyte raid mirror system for backup. your dual quadcore screams with the help of your 2 gig nvidea vid card. rendering large files in FF or photoshop just got sped up by about 10x

from what i've seen and heard, jffe, this is going to be a no-brainer. the only issue i've got any concern on at this point, is running all my old software. that remains to be seen yet and i guess the only way i'm going to find out is, go out and try it. after all, it's free for now. you dont have to pay till june of 2010. so, might as well test it out, ay?

jffe,

well, you can get it in 32 bit or 64 bit. the speed advantages would be there any time you can increase the effective amount of system ram available, so, that pretty much means 64 bit. the o/s footprint in ram is smaller than vista, too. i think vista took almost 2 gigs where win7 takes about 6 or 700 megs, according to the store guy.

and yes, i'm pretty sure you need a 64 bit mobo to run 64 bit software. ddr3 would help, of course, but you dont have to have it. the mimimum specs listed on microsoft.com seem, to me, pretty reasonable.

look, i dont know everything about win7 by a long shot. i dont have it yet and have only seen it being run in the store and talked to a few people about it, but everyone i've talked to that's used it, loves it! but, i shld mention that that store is quickly converting most of their computers on display to win7.

oh, and there is also an xp compatibility mode in case you have trouble running old software in the new system.

what i figure i'll be doing is building a new rig. i looked at the upgrade version of win7 and you can upgrade from xp to it, but it looked a bit odd in what you had to do to do that. they wanted a clean install, and i think they meant of xp and were recommending you back up all your files first, do the clean install and then upgrade and put all your stuff back. hmmm, you read it and see what you think it says: http://store.microsoft.com/microsoft/...ng_product . look down on the bottom, right of that page where it says 'running earlier versions?'. so, i figure i'll avoid all that and just get the full version on a clean, new machine.

thanks, vlad. the more i hear, the more i'm liking this new o/s.

uac = user account control, btw.

wow sounds very nice and your prices [ US ] are so much cheaper than we get things

It's funny talking about XP crashing off and on, Vista [ I know you have to spit when you say the word ] hasn't crashed on me for probly over a year

Then you'd be better off getting Vista or Xp so you only pay for an upgrade when you go to 7

you bought a rig with RC1 on it? that's very suspicious. i hope you didn't get charged for it since it's free for anyone to download!

FWIF, Windows 7 is final, and it's in the wild. theoretically you can install it today. you'll have to rearm the activation every 30 days - something that can be done 3x for a max trial period of 120 days which will easily bring you to the October 22 release date, at which point you will get your official key and you can just punch it in.

that's what i've done anyway. i pre-ordered Home Premium for GBP50 when Microsoft had a very generous pre-sale a few weeks ago. on October 22 i'll get my key in an email, and i'm good to go

well, i just got my new beast home! this thing is heavy! did i mention it has a 750 watt power supply? lol. i've never had one over 400 watts before i havent set it up yet. i think i'll just let it sit and admire it and drool on it for a while. i might break it if i turn it on!

I'm still totally not sold on Windows 7, even as a 1/3-1/2 way "power user" of my pc, between audio/graphics/video editing. But, I am trying to keep an open mind, and will wait for real world reports on how much faster things can be done, since well, since Pentium 3's, what else is there but speed and a few more frames per second when yer playing Halo XVII The jump in speed/power (which I would rate at a solid always 1.5X, up to almost 1.99X) when I went dualcore, makes me almost believe that a speed improvement can be had for a price. But really, my el-cheapo $750-$800 dualcore upgrade, was barely worth it to me. So unless I can get 2X speed/power for less than that again, not at all interested for another year or two. But again, that's just me, all my experience aside, I don't make all my living with the computer, so....

jffe

Think I'll wait till W7 is out next October and has been in use for a little while.

ouch! Craig that sucks big time! Not used Norton for years, tried one of the avg virus/firewall system what's it ones recently but was bugging me to bits so went back to Kaspersky.

Mind I do want a new pc kinda feeling restricted at the moment with lack of ram etc when running multiple software, so much for multitasking . Mind with the warm weather a lap top might be on the list of things to buy at a later date.

well, after three separate installs of the operating system, i've finally got vista home premium 64 bit on the new rig. in fact, i'm on it right now. they first installed the o/s without putting on the RAID. so, they wiped that one and tried again. when i got it home, now with RAID, i uninstalled norton antivirus and it broke the master boot record, whereupon i fixed the o/s with the repair function of the install disk. that's when i found out they had put the 32 bit vista home premium on my machine. so, i took it back. they had to order the 64 bit o/s and then took about four days to install it. and, when win7 comes out, yes, i shld get it for free, but it's going to be yet another install. i'm thinking i shld have just waited for win7 to come out before buying this thing and i'm definitely thinking of changing stores. sheesh!

anyways, i've got the basics on here now, zone alarm, avg anti-virus and win patrol. i've also downloaded FF but havent installed it yet. maybe tomorrow. it's late

the rig looks nice. the main box is quite quiet. fan technology has gotten a lot better in recent years... low noise now. i've got just a 22 inch monitor. i almost went for the 30 inch, but it was about twice as much, so, maybe later. vista is a hog, but with 6 actual functioning gigs of system ram and almost 1 gig of vid memory, i dont notice it too much... so far. we'll see when i put 50 gigs of pictures on here and 3 gigs of FF filters

so, for the moment, all is well with the world

all done ........... of course I can't tell any difference LOL

ok, i've installed the trial version of FF on the new rig and downloaded a couple filters i knew to be somewhat slow on my old rig. comparing the two rig render times is quite simply, amazing! the new rig is almost 10 TIMES FASTER! for the evergreen filter, my old rig renders the default at about 72 seconds. the new rig cranks it out at under 8 seconds! three dee's 'tree, summer' on the old renders in 3 minutes, 39 seconds. on the new rig it's 27.88 seconds! hehe, i've got a big old smile on my face this morning

well, i'm not throwing away my xp machine, jffe, but i am getting win7 for free now when it comes out

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jffe wrote: 5 reasons not to bother upgrading to Windows 7. Tongue jffe

lol link has expired for some reason..

got win 7 with my new machine still getting used to some of the functions.