Windows 7

[crewmeal]

If anyone is interested a beta version is available for download

Welcome to Windows 7 (http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windows-7/)

I'm not sure how it works after download and what effect it has on a computer. Anyone any ideas or technical info on this?

[Bushfiva]

I think you'll find the web site you downloaded it from has all the info you need.

[Parapunter]

The download link is still borked over here. I have been running a copy of build 7000 which I acquired by ahem, my own means. I like it well enough to persist with it, but it is still buggy & I found that it was taking minutes to access the web.

Then when I looked at the packet data, there billions going out from my machine, so I reckon I got something naughty along with my os. I wiped the drive & will start again with the ms official download as soon as they put enough 50p's in the meter.

[bnt]

One possible reason this might interest me is that they say it's slimmed down and more efficient than Vista, able to run on netbook-grade machines. I just want an operating system, not a complete lifestyle package. :8

[Parapunter]

Well my experience is positive overall. Very nimble around the os bits & bobs itself - the old chestnut is true that whilst you don't care very much if a mail merge takes 40 rather than 30 seconds, but it gets right up your nose if you have to wait five seconds to open a folder has been very well adressed in 7.

UAC has been throttled to everyones relief, many error messages in media centre, audio is troublesome, but then again I've hitched my wagon to Creative so that's my own fault really. It doesn't come with windows mail, as a result of the anti trust rulings I understand, so you will have to drop gmail, thunderbird, whatever in to do that. Devices hooked up to the machine are handled beautifully - plug a phone in for example & a photrealistic image pops up with al the options you may want for managing that device. You now have libraries for documents & media which are a cinch to use. Quick launch is gone. Instead you get similar icons that launch preview windows just above the taskbar. So if you have four firefox sessions running, you get four little preview windows if you hover over the firefox icon. Takes a little getting used to, but works well I think.

Network setup is automated as in Vista, but is smoothed out a little - you can still dive in to the gubbins as necessary, the control panel is much improved & that's about as I've done with it.

Essentially, it comes over as a polished iteration of Vista, the two main conclusions for me are it looks much better & runs far more sweetly.

[frostbite]

Maybe a dumb question (I'm good at those) but is it possible to run it from a DVD or dual boot it without too much aggravation?

[Parapunter]

It was for me. On my system, I have two hard drives. C: has Vista & the other is divided into two partitions M & X. M contains all my media with the exception of recorded tv, which is the logic for partitioning x drive I.e. because recorded tv files are largeish & are added & deleted regularly, I decided to let it be the fragmented partition. So when I stuck 7 on X, I just copied the tv files over to C & installed it there as a separate os on a separate drive.

The copy I downloaded was an iso, burnable to dvd via nero or similar, but I found I could extract the files with winrar & install form there. When I got rid, I used disk management to format the drive & a utility called bcd editor to remove the mbr record so that I stopped being given the dual boot option on start up - That is to say the in Vista, the boot.ini file is replaced by bcd.

Bcd editor is a utility to edit that file in a gui format rather than command line.

Quick cc clean & defrag & back to normal.

[Keef]

Did I get that right?

I have several spare (large) partitions on this machine. They're there for Linux distros, but I've only got round to installing a couple of those - the "old" PC is now the Linux box.

Could I install Win7 on a spare partition alongside XP, and dual-boot it using Grub - which is what decides XP, Fedora, or Slackware now?

[Parapunter]

I don't see why not Keef, provided you're comfy putting in & getting rid as required, it should be a doddle. IIRC win 7 requires 9gb & a few other conditions to run ok.

[Keef]

Yes, the instructions say much the same. Dual-boot setup instructions are included. Whether it will co-exist with Grub is another matter, but we can deal with that later. I don't use the Linux partitions on this machine these days so that's not a stopper.

It can have a spare 40GB partition. I'll have a try later.

If I don't reappear for a few weeks, you'll know what's happened and not to try this at home...

[seanbean]

Look here for a useful set of the above:

Tim Sneath : The Bumper List of Windows 7 Secrets (http://blogs.msdn.com/tims/archive/2009/01/12/the-bumper-list-of-windows-7-secrets.aspx)

[Keef]

Well, I'm half way! This is Win 7 using IE 8 Beta. It connects to the Internet, and does some stuff. I don't think it's killed the primary XP Pro installation - I'll find that out soon. It has removed the Grub boot option that starts the Linux distros, but I can soon put that back - and hopefully set it up to start Win 7 as an alternative.

It won't connect to my network. It wants me to set up its new network, which has to be called WORKGROUP, and has a wacky long password of its choosing. That's the first "serious issue" with it so far.

I'll take a peek at those "Secrets" when I've done playing...

[Parapunter]

On the network side, you might wish to look in devices on the cp to see if your router/modem is seen or even device manager to see whether you have drivers installed for ethernet for example.

On mine, I had to install my broadband (ntl) cd to get the connection running before I could add the router. OTOH seems you're online already...

[Keef]

I'm back in XP Pro now. All is well, although I have to be here to tell it to start that, rather than Win 7. Next job is to reinstate Grub, which will sort that. MS doesn't seem to recognise the existence of non-MS boot utilities :(

The connection to the router is there, and working fine. I can browse the web and do all that stuff. It's just that Win 7 won't let me tell it what the network is called, or how to connect to it. It's called "WORKGROUP", has a gibberish computer-designed password that must be used, and all the other machines have to go its way. Or, in this case, not.

Time to play. Somewhere in the depths will be the place where the network name and settings can be changed. Or Mr Microsoft has a problem. In the XP days, the network was called MSHOME but could be changed.

[Spitoon]

I'm back in XP Pro now. All is well, although I have to be here to tell it to start that, rather than Win 7.I suspect you are well aware but you can change the defual OS in boot.ini.

As for Windows 7 - I'm obvously unlucky in some way. Went for the 64-bit version - it won't upgrade from XP so it's got to be a clean installation. OK, it's going on a secondary partition so what harm can it do thinks I.

The installation looked to be going OK but after the first restart I got a BSOD saying that it didn't support my multiprocessor or somesuch. In the end I had to boot using an old recovery disk and then had to manually get rid of the Vista bootloader stuff. Still, had nothing else to do for that hour!

[green granite]

Decided to throw an earlier build out of the VM and install the official beta as a dual boot system. The only thing I was unhappy about during the install were a couple of periods of apparent inactivity, just the background screen and no disk activity, but it carried on after 5 mins or so.

Starts up quickly and seems to be stable. the main problems seem to the lack of drivers other than the bare bone ones that MS supplies, I can't install the Nvidia drivers from Nvidia as it says it's Un-reconized operating system. So until the OEM people update drivers some limitations will be obvious.

[Keef]

It found drivers for my nVidia card, although I don't know how "current" those are. It certainly works OK. It's a lot less finicky than I remember Vista being (for that short period I tinkered with it!)

The only two devices not working are my SCSI card and the cheapo USB webcam. As a result of the SCSI, the DVDROM and the scanner aren't live either, but that's not a big issue for now.

I've installed Firefox 3.0.5 and after some initial hiccups, that's working well. I've got the main plugins I have on the XP setup.

Still no network, unless I allow it to dictate the terms for networking. Not gonna do that.

Next question is how much of the "regular" software that I use to install to it.

[green granite]

About an hour after my last post MS offered me the Nvidia control panel as an update, works a treat. :ok:

[Parapunter]

I nailed every driver via device manager online update except for the one that drives my vfd screen thing. I was quite impressed by that. Taking into account that it's a beta os & only the nerds like us are gonna play with it, then those drivers provided by manufacturers show them to be jolly sporting chaps!:D

[Keef]

Well, Firefox works well under 7, apart from wacky things with font size (visible above).

There isn't a boot.ini in the version I have. It's all done with BCDEDIT, and that tells me I don't have the rights to play with the BCD. That's the only place it's played the "Admin" game, which is a major improvement on Vista.

I'm about to dig out my Knoppix disk, to reinstall Grub and the menu.lst approach to multi-boot. That's a lot more flexible (and easier to drive) than a BCD that won't talk to me anyway ;)

Now if I can just get this pesky Network thing to accle...

[Parapunter]

Download EasyBCD 1.7.2 - NeoSmart Technologies (http://neosmart.net/dl.php?id=1)

[planecrazy.eu]

Cant add much to this really, i have used Windows 7 only in VMWare for around 18 months now as i got it via MSDN, and have had several builds either via MSDN or via Uni.

I can say that in VMWare it runs better than Vista and Vista SP1 (Business), but not as good as server 2008.

I dont expect anything to run well in a virtual machine, but its good to compare, and use a few benchmark tools.

XP is still a clear winner as i dont give stuff about the visual design, if i did i would get a MAC for sure.

Vista is a little more security aware, but nothing you cant add to XP with a few bits of light software.

I have only used X86 or 32Bit one, so maybe the 64Bit version is just amazing and super quick.

If so, i can feel a notebook upgrade coming, even though i swore my next notebook would be a MacPro15"

[Keef]

I've sorted those two niggles. "Advanced System Settings" fixed both in about a minute. I'd not looked there before. Easy!

The "boot"option via ASS is far easier than messing with BCDEDIT.

The next test is to time this and XP - I doubt there will be much in it.

[green granite]

Re networking, mine works but only after I told it that it was a work network, the problem I now have is that none of the short cuts on my wife's m/c for doc sharing work any more as the drive partitions are different and if you start talking about drive letters her eyes glaze over. :ugh:

[green granite]

Having spent the last couple of days exclusively using 7 the following comments seem to be in order:

1) It seems to be faster thab XP, but that might be the way XP is set up.

2) I'm a webcam freak and there seems to be a problem when viewing some sites although I have the same add-ons/plugings etc. Some will only work if I switch to the IE tab some tell me access is denied which ever browser I use.

3) Double clicking on a desk top icon doesn't alllways open a program, you have to either right click and tell it to open, or refresh the desk top then double click.

4) Both browsers lock up completely on certain sites, but the OS reconises it and after trying to sort it out shuts the program down and compiles a report to send of to MS if you wish.

5) once you've got used to the admin stuff and the CP using slightly different names for things they seem to work better than in XP and much, much better than in Vista.

6) Colours are more vibrant than in XP which is nice for pictures (although setting up the monitor profile without a colourimeter may be a bit of a problem) but not so good on here as the colours are a bit "in your face" if you see what I mean. (no I haven't tried playing with settings) And monitor geometry is different so it needs setting up again.

Over all, a vast improvement over Vista and, with it's self repairing facility, an improvement over XP. will probably spend today tweeking it and seeing if I can get things a bit more 'normal' what ever that means. Time will tell

[Parapunter]

Just a footnote to this, I've found internet browsing to be a pain in win 7. My router is super busy, as though the system were conducting an enormous download I could neither see nor control. Thus, it would take minutes to open a webpage as something is munching all the bandwidth.

Anyway, in the course of a disk cleanup, I noticed something like 40gb of error reports, ran tcp view and sure enough, windows is generating, saving & uploading error reports constantly. I disbaled error reporting & hey presto, back to normal.

A quick google around the place & it's cropping up a lot. MS are aware it seems & I don't think I'm the only one to see the irony in error reporting causing errors!

[Keef]

Well, I'm a week into using it on the "home" machine and I'm impressed. It's better than XP, and way better than Vista.

I did a bunch of speed tests - boot-up, start various hefty software packages and the like - and it's a lot faster than XP Pro. I've fixed most of the "bugs" that bothered me at first. Some things that didn't work started to do so, all by themselves. I guess that's drivers and patches arriving automatically from MS.

The first few days seemed to have a memory leak, and I had to restart it every day or so when it froze. It's not done that lately, and has been on permanently for several days.

I've left it running on the Essex machine while I'm up in Norfolk for the weekend, and the VPN and remote desktop work just fine ( so far). If all else fails, I can phone home for a quick press on the reset button, which will bring it back up in XP.

I can see me using it all the time, rather than XP, till the test runs out.

The Windows 7 Forum (http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en/w7itproinstall/threads/) is an excellent resource for bugfixes, hints, and tips on how to sort stuff. It's far friendlier than any other "tech" forum I've visited. Folks there have had the answer to all but a couple of minor questions I've had.

Software that won't run on it:
Nero, Jeppesen Datacard Writer, ZoneAlarm.

Software that complains but works:
Skype

Hardware that has a problem:
LSILogic SCSI card (and thus SCSI scanner and DVDROM), cheap Chinese webcam.

A friend also running it found that it wouldn't recognise his graphics card, but it loaded generic drivers that work reasonably well. He runs Vista on his main machine, and reckons this beats it hands-down.

[green granite]

I've just plashed out for a 24" monitor to replace my 19" crt one, Running at it's native res of 1900*1200 using XP it's a case of squinting to read things on the desk top and in apps, constantly having tp use the mouse wheel. In windows 7, with the text size set to 125%, it's brilliant and everything resizes it's self for "best fit".

Must explore those foums as I'm having troubles with Firefox and IE crashing especially when switching to the IE tab in FF, but only on some sites.

Over all I too am impressed, lets hope that the shrinkwrapped version isn't too tarted up.

[Tosh McCaber]

Comprehensive insight- and comments

What You Should Expect from the Windows 7 Beta :: the How-To Geek (http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/the-geek-blog/what-you-should-expect-from-the-windows-7-beta/)

[green granite]

Apparently IE8 is unstable and is crashing things.

[Loose rivets]

I can see me using it all the time, rather than XP, till the test runs out.

Is One obliged to stop using a Beta copy after a certain time?

[Parapunter]

Yeeeess...but there are ways around that & google will point you in the wrongun direction. Mine is activated and staying that way but I am not necessarily on the right side of the rules as it were.

However, it would be sage to bear in mind that 7 is only a beta & the public availability is intended to be used to gather information so that ms can deliver a more polished and stable version.

[frostbite]

I believe it stops working sometime in July, which is why I decided not to bother.

[Keef]

End-July is what I understood. If there's a new Beta then, I'll install that and continue. If they launch the full version, it'll be a price decision. XP Pro does the job, but Win7 is a lot faster and a lot nicer. It's almost weaned me off Linux!

[green granite]

It's almost weaned me off Linux!

Good grief thats almost amounting to praise. :E

But I agree it's much the best version to date, and fast is the word.

I suspect that the August cut-off date for the Beta is that it is intended to launch the shrink-wrapped version around then.

[Loose rivets]

My PC has a modest 1gig of memory...okay-ish for XP, but what's the minimum memory for Win 7 ?


I've gathered that 2gigs is about minimum for Vista, so went out to buy an upgrade for my PC in anticipation of installing Win 7. Sadly, I've got two half gigs as memory, so it means throwing that investment away I suppose.

When I got to the store, the nice lass said my PC 2700 DDR SDRAM was the old type and this means that two gigs was going to cost me twice as much as modern (faster) memory. That's annoying. But is it true? I know that I can't use memory that's too slow, but why can't I use faster memory - or is it a case of the slot not being appropriate?

HP AMD Athlon 64 3400+ (2.2GHz) 1200MHz System bus.

[jimtherev]

I guess it's due to the fact that the mighty chip companies are now concentrating on producing DDR2 chips, leaving us DDR users bobbing about making use of obsolete memory. The economies of scale are - understandably, I guess, being found with the memory which is in most demand by the Dells of this world. They probably are still producing DDR stuff, but, being old hat, aren't trying too hard to reduce the cost: the volume's not there any longer.
Make sense?

[Parapunter]

Rivets, go to crucial.com & follow the instructions, that'll give you a steer.

[Loose rivets]

Ta!












.

[frostbite]

Just out of interest, what is the size of the W7 download? Not seen that mentioned anywhere.

[jimtherev]

W7 is a 2.5 gig download.
However I must have found a very fast server or mirror - seemed to take no time at all.