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Svart

Well-known member
Joined
Jun 4, 2004
Messages
5,134
Location
Atlanta GA USA
I'm running it now.  64bit.  This thing is smoking fast.  So far this blows XP out of the water.  it's not what I expected at all.  Other than that, it looks like vista but runs much smoother and has a lot of interesting new things that I thought I would hate but actually like.  one being that you can hover over a the taskbar icon of the program you are using and it will instantly pop up thumbnails of all of the windows you have open with that program.  Say I have 5 firefox windows open and I hover over the taskbar icon for Firefox and all 5 windows will show as thumbnails.  I can instantly choose the right one without having to maximize firefox and then scroll through the tabs.

Once you get down through the bubbly exterior a lot of the power user stuff looks the same as XP.
 
7100. 

I've been going through every little piece of this OS and honestly it's not *that* different.  The familiar menus are all there, they are just hidden under layers of other things.

It certainly runs faster than Vista and even runs faster than my old XP install.  Of course that was 32 bit and now I'm running 64 bit.

 
Hey Svart...

What are your computer specs?

CPU?
Mobo?
RAM?
HDDs?
Video card?
etc.

How much RAM is consumed by Windows 7 at idle?

I've heard a lot of good things about 7 & performance...just wanting to get a better perspective by filling in some system spec blanks.
 
Svart said:
7100. 

I've been going through every little piece of this OS and honestly it's not *that* different.  The familiar menus are all there, they are just hidden under layers of other things.

It certainly runs faster than Vista and even runs faster than my old XP install.  Of course that was 32 bit and now I'm running 64 bit.

ah that IS the release candidate.  I ran the beta (7026) before and I'm running the RC now and was surprised that the pop-up previews weren't there anymore.  Maybe that's only with Aero enabled. 

 
I have aero enabled but I don't get any popups.

I'm running:

amd phenom2 x3 2.6ghz
gigabyte ma770 motherboard
4gb ddr3 ram
seagate 3gb/s sata2 drive
geforce 8600gts
onboard sound, etc.


with all my background stuff I'm right at 1gb of ram consumed at idle.  You can greatly reduce this if you kill all of the pretty transparencies and animated windows and stuff.  The nice transparency stuff eats 100 to 200mb easy.

I haven't figured out what some of the services are yet.  I generally kill a lot of the services that I don't use to reduce unneeded ram usage.  I'm not running defender, firewall, update or any of that stuff.

I also use around 5% of the CPU at idle too, I suppose its all the pretty stuff too.


A funny thing though, it seems that things slowed down slightly when I installed the real drivers for the sound/lan/chipset.  It seems like the windows drivers were faster..  I might go back and see. 
 
In general, do you need specific drivers for Windows 7 ? Or are most of the XP-drivers working just fine ?

There's for instance this Firewire-interface, the V-Fire from Presonus. No drivers beyond XP were announced, explaining the reduced current price. It'd be cool if it just works in W7, but I have no idea if W7 uses some essentially different stuff under the hood.

Thanks,

  Peter

 
I used Vista drivers (I have Echo Audiofire) and Nvidia even has Win7 drivers...
So I'd suggest Vista drivers in general....
 
jackies said:
I used Vista drivers (I have Echo Audiofire) and Nvidia even has Win7 drivers...
So I'd suggest Vista drivers in general....

The thing is, mentioned Presonus box doesn't even have Vista drivers, life seems to stop
at (including) XP.

I'm not into drivers etc, so have no idea if there are structural limitations/changes w.r.t. drivers when going from XP - to - Vista - to - 7.

Thanks,

  Peter
 
WinXP drivers for certain types of devices may work fine in Vista or 7 because the underlying implementation may be standardized or perhaps Microsoft hasn't changed their implementation much.

For example, interaction between a USB device & host is standardized by USB-IF (www.usb.org), so I would expect WinXP drivers for USB devices to have a better chance of working in 7 than WinXP audio device drivers.

Actually, Microsoft changed their audio architecture quite a bit from XP->Vista.
I'm sure the audio system in 7 is very similar to Vista's.

When I was working for E-MU, our XP audio drivers worked okay in Vista, but there were a few sample rate-related bugs and some other stuff that forced us to release proper Vista drivers.

I don't think there's any way to know if it will work or to what extent it will work without until you test it.
 
Skylar said:
I don't think there's any way to know if it will work or to what extent it will work without until you test it.

Hi,

Thanks for the response. The specific case is for Firewire, no idea what might have changed there ?

But like you said, the proof is in the...  etc.

Bye,

  Peter

 
This OLD laptop has Win7 (early beta) installed. Mostly it ran fine. Not "faster than XP", but a lot more nimble than Vista on better machinery.

BUT: there is a killer bug. It relates to the specific Nvidia chip nailed to the laptop mobo. This specific chip was not used in any other product except this one Dell chassis. Nvidia disclaims knowing it, and Dell lost interest long ago.

If I hit ANY of the "transparent" effects, the machine locks solid.

This means I can NOT play Solitaire, because good old Win 2.0 SOL is gone, the new Solitaire is total eye-candy, and locks when touched.

Just utterly jammed. Doesn't even leave a bug-check behind. Or respond to long-press on Power button. Have to pull the AC, pull both batteries, and count to 10.  

I believe there is an unsupported function call in the driver, which does not even return "unsupported". This did not matter until MS went scrounging in driver interfaces looking for silly tricks they could use for no real purpose.

For more fun: Win7 installs a new boot-loader. You no longer hand-edit boot.ini to select operating systems, but a binary-gibberish file "bootmgr". So how do I get Win7 bootloader OFF this machine? (The beta will expire in some months.) There is a command-line tool to edit the boot options. I have figured it out enough to put XP as the default. But I think bootmgr is invoked in boot-sector, so I can't easily get rid of it.

No particular matter. I love this beast, but am starting to admit that despite the incredible 1600x1200 resolution(!)  and-TWO- CD bays.... a 1.6GHz P4 with an antiquated video chip is going out of style. Also it is a shoulder-buster.

I do think I will be on Win7 very very soon. I will not be generally changing-over from XP; there's no in-place conversion for "less" than Vista, and there's little in Win7 which justifies a full re-build. However after trying to make XP run on a new "Vista PC" (which shipped with an XP "down-license"), I think the hardware has gotten just a little too tricky for XP, and Win7 seems a very acceptable thing.
 
I think Win7 is the best windows ever, I try build 6956 and i love it, clean and fun....Almost like a...mac :-\...Now it's expired, lucky me... i set bios date 1 year earlier and....it's work.. ;D. Don't tell me to use my win xp anymore after tying win7...i will buy it soon as it available ..
 
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