[Golbeze]

So, I just installed RC1 64-bit of Windows 7, and thought I'd give my initial thoughts on it. Installation went without a hitch, it detected all my stuff and actually installed quite speedily. New startup screen is a nice touch, nice aesthetic change from the plain black with nothing but the word Windows and a loading bar that Vista sports.

Loading into the desktop, it is quite different from any previous versions of Windows. The way you can now pin icons to the taskbar is different from the normal quicklaunch bar I'm used to, but I'm quite easily adapting. I really like the way when you hover the mouse over a program or folder icon in the taskbar is shows all instances of it in little previews, and the way you can simply switch to an instance by simply clicking on it, and the fact there's even a close button in the preview are very nice touches. I also like the way when you hover the mouse over a preview, it makes all other windows clear so you can more easily see the window you're focusing on.

Now, network detection. It connected to my wired connection during the initial setup, just like Vista. However, for my wireless connection, I had to enter everything manually, why they didn't put in automatic detection of wireless networks I have no clue, but it would've been nice, I had to go into my router's settings to remember my SSID.

Right now I'm in the process of installing drivers and programs, and so far everything is going smooth. UAC, even though it has a slider now, I decided to turn off, as I did with Vista. I do like the fact, though, that turning it off no longer requires a restart, I was happy that I could just continue on after I did.

So, final thoughts on it; even after only experiencing it for a couple hours now, I'm really enjoying it. It is definitely a step up from Vista IMO, and even Vista I had been enjoying since when it first came out, and had thought was an improvement over XP, so I'm impressed. Now I just gotta save up the cash to buy it when it comes out.

[Judas]

i've setup win7 on 3 machines with RC1 and all 3 of them were able to connect to my wireless routers without a hitch glitch or stall.

[mkk]

Originally Posted by Golbeze

Loading into the desktop, it is quite different from any previous versions of Windows. The way you can now pin icons to the taskbar is different from the normal quicklaunch bar I'm used to, but I'm quite easily adapting.

Yeah that's the first thing that people will either love or hate, just wait and see when end customers recieve it. I've never really given the default small button look a chance since I rarely have that many programs open and don't need launch icons on the taskbar, but on the other hand I really like the flat look of the Aero glass taskbar. I could never get the rounded Aero to "work" for me in Vista but now finally I've kept the glass look.

I haven't got a wireless to test but I've read about quite a few problems on the Microsoft TechNet forums. If there are further problems with it, try looking for newer drivers for the wireless card/stick.

Now I just gotta save up the cash to buy it when it comes out.

This release candidate will also last quite a while and be more than 99% the same as the finished product, so you don't have to rush to buy right away.

[YnHDaRkMaN]

yeah me too, you just click on your wireless connection, type in the password, and you're good to go (this on the Beta and RC)

[Golbeze]

Yah, I got the wireless working just fine, and I did have to install the drivers (got them through Windows Update), just when I went to configure it, instead of finding my wireless router automatically and giving it to me in a choice of options, it wanted me to input the SSID manually, where Vista would automatically detect it. There was no option to automatically search for a wireless network, unless I just didn't see it.

[Tyrsonswood]

I've had just the opposite impression of win7........... buggiest OS I have ever seen............ granted I run old systems but this POS is on it's last legs for me.



Sick of it totally!

[Zardon]

ive had a disaster with it too on the nehalem EP system but im battling with it atm to see if I can hack it to get the weird CPU spiking issues isolated.

[Mac Daddy]

They seriously have to address that dual CPU issue. It won't affect all home users but I am sure applications involving a large amount of graphics rendering, etc are moving to this platform.

My personal experience hasn't been too bad with the exception of non support for Adobe Flash (Win7 64 bit) ... quite annoying

[Judas]

it's been annoying about the adobe flash since windows xp 64bit launched..... i would love to use the 64bit client of IE.....

[Mac Daddy]

Originally Posted by Zardon

ive had a disaster with it too on the nehalem EP system but im battling with it atm to see if I can hack it to get the weird CPU spiking issues isolated.

Might be going way into left field here but just had an idea mate. Have you tried using an ATI card with an official Win7 Cat driver on this system?

[cbeasley0]

I was having severe issues with Adobe CS4 installing and running. I never could get it to work right, so I boot to a vista x64 just for my design.

I run crossfire 4850's and they installed fine. I was playing crysis on it, full blast, within 30 min.

[FuNsTeR]

the only issue i have with windows 7 32bit is problems with internet explorer hanging whilst mozilla works fine ... go figure

[Tyrsonswood]

Originally Posted by FuNsTeR

the only issue i have with windows 7 32bit is problems with internet explorer hanging whilst mozilla works fine ... go figure

That's probably for your safety......

[FuNsTeR]

Originally Posted by Tyrsonswood

That's probably for your safety......

for my safety you say ... what is so unsafe about trying to visit say play.com, hobbyeasy.com, modelhobbies.co.uk, pie & bovril forum (football or soccer for yanks) etc ... i would be interested to hear your thoughts in why these sites are unsafe

[Tyrsonswood]

Was sort of a joke mate......

But would be typical of a response from MS about this issue. Heck, here it takes about a minute or more for IE8 to load the windows update page.....???? Go figure

[FuNsTeR]

no problem mate

i thought you meant i was visiting dodgy sites i haven't visited those sites since the 1990s

[Stop It]

Aside from some weird sound issues like heavy audio crackling using both my onboard Realtek ALC 889 and my old trusty Audigy2 ZS (now fixed), I am very happy with Windows 7 so far.

All in all the OS justifies the asking price for me, at least the Home Premium edition, and of course, my RC version will be fully functional until the OS is sent to me, so I am all set, yey

[lepel]

IS it me or did they change/improve the defragmentation tool. I can see the actual progress in percentage now.

[buburuza76]

Originally Posted by cbeasley0

I was having severe issues with Adobe CS4 installing and running. I never could get it to work right, so I boot to a vista x64 just for my design.

I run crossfire 4850's and they installed fine. I was playing crysis on it, full blast, within 30 min.

My Adobe works fine with beta, RC1 and RTM as well

[dipstick]

Switching over from a fairly fresh install of Vista SP2 I can honestly say that windows 7 is a worthy upgrade. I'll list my pros and cons of 7 rtm compared to Vista sp2

Pros:
-Massively reduced HD activity. With 7 i'm on the desktop in 20 secs and my HD is dead in the water whereas Vista will beat the crap out of it for 3-5 minutes (same goes for when quitting something mem intensive). I think this might have something to do with System Protection as I can even see the difference on my PerfectDisk drive map (there are A LOT less of those "black" excluded system file clusters).
-Much faster HD/Network transfers. Copying files from one HD to the other is like night and day over vista even after SP2. Transfers over network are also better at maintaining max speeds instead of slowly winding down like Vista
-SLI improvements. Games that support sli have shown small but noticeable improvements
-UI. Feels snappier and is improved over Vista
-Apps like WMP, Paint, and wordpad have had some really nice updates
-Great app compatibility for an OS that isn't even released to the public yet.

Cons:
-UI. Will take some getting used to. For some things that were at your fingertips on vista you have to dig a little more on 7. I like and hate things on both OS's.
-windows doesn't remember windows size or position. MUCH more annoying than on Vista. Especially true on Games Explorer and My Computer folders
-59Hz monitor issue. I haven't run into any issues with games but I have heard is messes with some. Its an easy fix that should have been fixed already for those affected
-WEI scoring is all over the place and in its current form is all but useless


That's all i can think of atm. I'll edit as I remember more

[Judas]

Originally Posted by dipstick

on both OS's.
-windows doesn't remember windows size or position. MUCH more annoying than on Vista. Especially true on Games Explorer and My Computer folders
-59Hz monitor issue. I haven't run into any issues with games but I have heard is messes with some. Its an easy fix that should have been fixed already for those affected

I've found win7 to be the first to fully REMEMBER precisely where and how a window has been opened EVERY SINGLE TIME....

shrink it a bit, and close reopen and it nails it every time.

the 59hz monitor issues has been prevailent in vista for ages....

it's not so much of an issues though. However for people with 24hz HDTVs, it's a MAJOR issue as win7 emediately sets the lowest reported supported refreshrate as the default.. meaning the moment you get the drivers installed for the video adapter, your presented with no signal and you must nearly EVERY TIME you startup the machine, have to start in low resolution VGA mode. Catalyst control center's display management (with a bit of tweaking) can resolve this..

but as of yet, i've been unable to resolve this with Nvidia's own control panel.

Just kinda pisses me off that Microsoft gives us all this useful sliders and option in the "resolution" windows, but still neglects to give us a drop down menu or slider for Refresh rate on the VERY same screen.

Why do i mention this?

Because if you select a resolution and APPLY it, and the refresh that win7 selects for it is out of range, your screwed reguardless of what you do and have to go back. Gotta use a 3rd party tool to get to the resolution your requesting.

[dipstick]

Thanks I've tried all known tricks but 7 is not as good at it as Vista (XP was better than both imo). The position doesn't matter to me but the size issues are getting to me. Lots of peeps are recommending that windows manager app but I don't wanna run something like that just to be able to remember sizes. Tbh you are pretty much the only one that I've talked to that's not having this issue
As for 59Hz, its just windows 7 rounding off to 59 instead of 60 like previous windows -no monitor really runs at 60Hz, all of them run at like 59.x.
XP and Vista did not have that issue but I hear if you disable your monitor DDC you can select 60Hz. Rumor is that a handful of games will not run when they see 59Hz..

[Chaos]

I am able to choose 60Hz on both the screens i am using, 26" Acer and 24" Samsung without issue. Windows positions and sizes work rather well with Win 7 here. I dont care for the snap to feature much but I can see where it could be usefull

[dipstick]

Weird I've done a few clean installs and its the same on all of our pc's. I notice you and judas are running ati cards so maybe its something nvidia related

[Takaharu]

Windows 7 did pretty well for me; I've currently got it installed on my secondary PC with no driver issues and, so far, no problems with software.
The interface isn't really that much different from Windows Vista so there's not really much I can say about that, as I'm currently using Vista Ultimate x64. What I'm not really fond of, though, is with Windows Live (Aka: MSN) Messenger when you close the main window. Usually, when you close the main window of the program, it'll actually close and place an icon in the system tray. Not with Windows 7, though; when you click to close Messenger it'll seemingly minimise and you'll have the window sitting in your taskbar, exactly as if had been minimised. I'm hoping that there'll either be a new update to Messenger when 7 comes out because I personally find it to be one of the bigger features of WL Messenger.
The ability to customise the UAC is nice. Although I don't have a problem with Vista's UAC system, it's good that I can say to people that did find it annoying "By the way, you can tell the UAC to stop pestering you for most things or you can turn it off completely". I've actually toned it down a notch as well because I found it a tad annoying that it prompted you every time you wanted to rename something in the Program Files folder or the All Users "Start" menu. Being the only user of my PC, I don't really need Windows to question my judgement on renaming shortcuts for "other users".

I'm looking forward to seeing how well 7 performs in a corporate environment. Although the company I work for is not likely to be able to afford to upgrade all of the computers in the company any time soon, I'd imagine that, using Server 2008 with a patch or Server 2008 R2 (which we're going to try to push for) will be able to be used if they come pre-installed on newly-ordered PCs without any trouble with Active Directory. I've already tried out the applications that we currently use and all of them, including all of the bespoke applications worked fine, unlike Vista, which had a few problems. We're currently using Windows XP and, although migration to a new operating system is a way off, being able to us both XP and 7 flawlessly would be beneficial.

[OldBuzzard]

I have WIN 7 RC1 32 bit running quite nicely on an ASUS EEE 900

Bought it a couple of weeks ago at Microcenter for $199.00

It's a refurbished one with the 16GB SSD in it. I replaced the 512MB so-dimm with 1GB of Corsair Value select (about $25.00).

I used a USB DVD drive that my wife bought for her Acer Aspire One, to install WIN 7. It wasn't the fastest install that I've ever seen but it did eventually finish

To tell the truth, the little puppy is running faster with WIN 7 than it did with the original XP. I guess part of it is that it's not being bogged down by a lot of the 'crapware' that ASUS put on it.

But still, this thing only has a 900Mhz Celeron, 1GB RAM, and a 16GB SSD in it. Not exactly a 'high end' system, and WIN 7 is running quite happily on it.