Windows 7

[Dichodog]

A buddy of mine was over Sunday absolutely GUSHING about Windows 7.  He plays WOW and has had no problems with it.  I just put a new power supply in my computer which solved a wonky little problem I'd been having with it and had been doing some offline flying getting ready to get back in the game some time later this year unless something ELSE stomps on my head but I digress...

Anybody hearing anything good / bad about Windows 7?  I'm seriously considering getting it and would like more than one opinion before I go on the AH boards.

Skuzzy was very vague when I emailed him. 

[Ghosth]

Why? what does it do that xp doesn't do with less resources?

Now, don't get me wrong, I'm running a dual boot system myself.

It doesn't have the huge performance hit that vista had.
However it does love to hide things your looking for.

[Harppa]

I've had Win7 since Christmas, a 32 bit Home Premium in my laptop, and a  64 bit Ultimate in my PC. There has been No problems with drivers or any programs I use.  Of course I had to adjust some things in windows to make it work properly, but that's what I've already got used to when fiddling with XP.
The only problem I had was with  my old network card for which there was not even vista drivers available.
Some older (win95/98) programs and games may not work anymore under Win7, not even with the compatibility mode.

Though XP did what I wanted, I'm not looking back. Win7 is the future.

Cheers!
Harppa

[Drone]

After FSO tonight, my machine is going under the knife too.

6 year old install of XP.. yeah, yeah,.. I know.. but I don't even know if I could reinstall the original XP if I wanted to.  I had one 'upgrade', over the years,  that forced me to call MS and get a new key for the OS. Didn't want to risk running into that headache again if I didn't have to, so I've been cleaning up this box as best as I could.

The fit with getting Bad Company 2 running was the last straw.

So... now that my job has authorized the remote software for Win 7, it's time. 

Picked up a fresh 1TB SATA drive to install it on.   

Found a dxdiag from 3/2/2004.. AMD 1800  CPU.  512MB Ram, GeForce 5700 Video..

DirectX drivers were still 9.0b

[Drone]

Progress Report:

Couple lessons learned so far...

When your computer beeps 3 times.. then repeats.. and repeats... at startup..

That's CPU Speak  for "You $!#@$@.. you forgot to reinstall your RAM!  Gimme me some memory you stupid #$!#$!! "

It is a WHOLE lot easier for your system to recognize a new HD if you remember to plug the power cable into then new HDD.

Currently installing..

[daddog]

LOL Glad you figured it out.
I am thinking about buying W7 myself and installing it on my system. It is a relatively new system I built last summer. Can't use all the RAM I bought for it because I am running XP.

[Ghosth]

Well personally Daddog that is not a good enough reason to switch OS.
But then I do tend to be a minimalist.

Win 7 has its points, but it also hides a lot of stuff.

[Hamerd]

I've been using win 7 ultimate since dec or so and in my opinion its very smooth hands down over vista, no issues with installing games as of yet, seems stable but as Ghosth says I'm not sure what it's hiding     but happy with it so far, and with any of the win os  don't buy the basic nothing ever good come from it. Again just my opinion 
                                                                       Hamerd

[Flushed]

I haven't decided whether to upgrade to win 7 yet. I am partly of the mind if it ain't broke don't fix it. I have be considering getting an external Hard drive for my laptop. Would it be worth it to upgrade to win 7 when I do that? I may wait until the renovation on my house is complete and just buy a new desktop or try to build one on my own. I like alienware products simply because they don't load all the junk software that you get and never use from going to a store and buy a ready built desktop. Haven't made up my mind yet. I don't know whether it would be cheaper to build on or buy one either. I guess I'll have to do some checking. I know it'd be more fun to build it myself just don't know what type of expense to build what I want.

[mrmidi]

CPU/MOBO combo, memory, video card, PSU...thats where you need to spend the bulk of your money the rest doesn't have to be the most expensive. Keyboard, mouse,
HDD, DVD, case, and so on.

 
midi

[Ghosth]

Flushed, you have hardware in your computer that is more than 2 years old?

I could be wrong, but I think that is about the break point. If its older than that Win 7 may have problems finding drivers for everything. Newer than that and you should be ok.

[Flushed]

Yes, I bought this one in april 2008. It is working fine, I believe I'll leave it alone and either buy a new one or build one next year.

[Drone]

Some updates on my Win 7 install.

Looks like I've finally quit getting updates for the OS.  Between those and getting all my AH views/settings/maps moved over from my backups, I must have whacked my X52 mapping file, so, as some of you were witness Sunday night, it didn't work very well.

And with the latest profiler software, it looks like I have to rebuild my mapping file... ick..

It doesn't appear that Win7 is as fast or faster on this hardware than XP was.. which really surprises me.  I thought I had a lot of crud bogging it down.  Guess not.

So.. just found out, this morning, that the 2GB that I have is all this box will take ( DDR2 667 ).  I'm thinking I want 4GB, at least, for Win7.

Soo... do I upgrade the CPU/MB from Celeron D/3.4 GH to something a little more beefy.. or undo my Win7, go back to XP and do a little more research..

Decisions, decisions..

[Ghosth]

Tough decision drone.

Question, exactly what was it that you thought Win 7 was going to do for you that XP isn't?

[Drone]

As utterly inconceivable as it may seem, I expected it to speed this machine up.

Here's the reasoning..

As I have posted in other areas, this installation of XP was 6 years old. It has been through numerous MB/HDD upgrades, with countless software installations/deinstallations.  3 different versions of MS Office, Frontpage, Macromedia suites, and.. we won't even try to count the games.  I still had photodraw installed, which hadn't been supported in at least 3 years.. and even AH1. 

So.. I was thinking that there had to be an incredible amount of crud in my registry that even the cleaners won't pick up. 

With nothing running, I have 50 processes under task manager.  And the effort of figuring out which ones were necessary was just too daunting... went through it once or twice before, but couldn't find the notes. 

After the bout with getting Bad Company 2 installed, I figured that a new OS would minimize the chance that some other obscure missing utility would waste so much of my time in the future.

Gads.. looks like they still haven't fixed MSIE 8 and the message buffer limit.. .. end of part 1.

[Drone]

Rambling, the sequel..

Now.. why didn't I just do a clean install of XP and treat it like Win 7 with reinstalling everything?  Didn't really think about it.  At some point in the lifecycle of this machine, I upgraded something and the OS said my registration key was invalid, so I ended up with a long conversation with Microsoft which resulted in having to enter a brain numbingly long string of numbers to reactivate the machine.  I didn't want to risk having to go through that again.

However, .. having thought about it a bit more over the last day or so, that may not be an issue.

Downloading 8 years worth of updates ( version 2002 ) really doesn't appeal to me, though.

Anyway, so I'm looking at Motherboards and CPUs today, and I'm trying to figure out where my current processor falls in all the infernal options. 

Is there a graph somewhere that outlines what processors/speed are comparable to what?  My God, there are so many variations, it's just sick. Looks like I maxed out MSIE 8 buffer again.. I'll stop now.
 

[Drone]

Oh good grief..   Just noticed my CPU is 64bit.. and I installed the 32 bit OS Win 7.
 

Glad I get paid for just working on mainframes.. sheesh....

Maybe I'll start over with the 64 bit Win 7..

[Ghosth]

Well drone its been my experience that each major Windows release is 4X as big as the previous release.

So far I have yet to be disappointed.

If you had 8 gig of ram I'd say it would be worthwhile going to Win 7 64 bit so you could use all of it.

But with only 2gig of ram I really not seeing any advantage to switching to win 7.

As to managing processes, I highly recomend Glary Utilities, it has a process manager, that lets you "google" entrys, seeing what they are, and if they are needed for windows to run or not. Same for start menu manager.

[daddog]

As to managing processes, I highly recomend Glary Utilities, it has a process manager, that lets you "google" entrys, seeing what they are, and if they are needed for windows to run or not. Same for start menu manager.

I tried Glary Utilities and it is sweet Ghosth. Couple that with Game Booster and it was a big help. Pretty sure I will upgrade to W7 this summer as I have the ram for it.

[Drone]

Thanks for the info Ghosth..

Another update.. I reverted back to XP, so everything is functional for the time being. 

Doing a little reality check, I decided to take a closer look at my hardware and did a little checking on what, exactly, I had.

Found this site to compare different CPUS and benchmarks...

http://www.tomshardware.com/charts/processors,6.html

Tried to find my CPU ( Celeron D, 3.46 GHz ) and didn't, but reading some of the message boards here, I determined that 'ancient' may be an appropriate usage for this chip. 533MHz FSB, 512KB  Cache. Single Core

Also looked up my motherboard and discovered I can handle a 1066 MHz FSB 775 socket.

So, I ordered a Core2 Duo E7600 3.06GHz, 3MB cache, 1066MHz FSB.. from tigerdirect  (newegg didn't stock it ) and it should be in Sat or Mon.  ( maybe even tomorrow.. they said they shipped it yesterday ).

That should max out my MB for the next year or so, until I'm ready to go up to the next socket size and RAM, which should be about DDR7 by then.. lol.

Gotta love it..

[daddog]

Nice Drone!

What are you doing with your copy of Windows 7? Going to hang on to it?

[Drone]

Yeah.. planning to see what happens with the chip upgrade.  It's already activated and registered, though.. not sure if I could reassign it or not.

[daddog]

Rgr thanks. Figured I would ask. 

[Kansas2]

Tried to find my CPU ( Celeron D, 3.46 GHz )

So, I ordered a Core2 Duo E7600 3.06GHz, 3MB cache, 1066MHz FSB.. from tigerdirect 

Huge difference, you should see a big improvement! What video card do you have?

[Drone]

oooooohhhhhh   yeahhhhhh... baby..

It showed up yesterday and I dropped it in last night.  Huge difference.

VC is Nvidia GeForce 9800 GTX