Windows 7 Beta

[lonewolff]

I work for an OEM and even though it is cheaper, there is a massive 'buy price' difference between the versions.

[pjcast]

I installed and played with Windows 7 a bit the other day... I wasn't that impressed, looked pretty much like Vista (which I already have and don't use). Though, Windows 7 kept crashing/freezing on me. However, probably not a good idea to install a beta software on a Macbook bootcamp partition

[lonewolff]

Yes, probably not.

I haven't had any lockups whatsoever but I wasn's trying to run it on a Mac.

[Klaim]

lonewolf> Are you talking about difference of prices between public versions?

[lonewolff]

I am not sure what you mean by 'public versions'.

We are an OEM system builder that supplies to the public if thats what you mean.

Our buy price from the national distributor varies into the hundreds of dollars between versions of the OS.

[Klaim]

Windows 7 Starter (worldwide via OEM only)
Windows 7 Home Basic (emerging markets)
Windows 7 Home Premium (worldwide)
Windows 7 Professional (worldwide)
Windows 7 Ultimate (worldwide)
Windows 7 Enterprise (volume licenses)

(source : http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/news/2 ... itions.ars )

Home Premium, Professional and Ultimate are what I call "public" licenses.

[lonewolff]

Windows 7 Starter (worldwide via OEM only)
Windows 7 Home Basic (emerging markets)
Windows 7 Home Premium (worldwide)
Windows 7 Professional (worldwide)
Windows 7 Ultimate (worldwide)
Windows 7 Enterprise (volume licenses)

(source : http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/news/2 ... itions.ars )

Home Premium, Professional and Ultimate are what I call "public" licenses.

Oh, ok.

We sell Vista Home Basic, Home Premium, Business, & Ultimate. But, as I said - our buy price varies greatly.

[Klaim]

I'm assuming you cannot, but just to be sure, can you give an order of magnitude of this variation of prices?

[lonewolff]

From memory there is somewhere around $200-$300 difference between basic and ultimate

[stoneCold]

UAC messages keep to annoy me (no improvement since Vista as far as I recognized), therefore I turned it of immediately.

Good news on that, it seems that I have to give Win7 a second chance (maybe )

-----> http://www.neowin.net/news/main/09/01/0 ... th-the-uac

[Jerky]

wow, seven runs well on you computer ?
on mine (athlon xp 2400+, radeon 9600, 1go ram) it is very slow, it takes a huge amount of ram (600-700 Mo/1go at startup) and the cpu is nearly always at 80% when I am just surfing the web with Windows media player playing a mp3 and Windows Live Messenger in background.

But I agree with you, with a few tweaks, the new taskbar can become awesome

It runs like butter on my work laptop (read: lightning fast). I've had very minor issues, mostly driver related which is to be expected with a beta.

Core2 Centrino, 2GB, 256mb FireGl

[Klaim]

So, now that Windows 7 is in RC stage, what are your feelings toward the beta and RC versions today?

[Kojack]

I installed the RC, found out that Comodo Firewall isn't compatible yet, found out that the new task bar sucks, and went back to vista 64. Total time I could bare to use it: around 60 min.
I do intend to do some testing with it (performance and compatibility), but for general use I prefer vista. If I can find a way to disable the new task bar crap and get a quicklaunch bar back I might give it more of a chance.

[Caphalor]

It is possible:

1. Task bar -> Properties -> Small symbols.
2. Task bar -> Properties ->Change "taskbar's pushbuttons" to "unify when taskbar is full".

This leads to a vista style taskbar with Aero peek.
Why do you want the old quicklaunch bar back? You can pin every program to the taskbar, and if a program is already opened, hold shift, click on the item in the taskbar and a new instance of the program will be created.

[Kojack]

I'd already done that, as well as switching to the windows classic theme, and it's still far from the vista task bar.
Small icons have a massive gap around them, wasting space. I can't get multiple rows of icons (in vista I have a 4x2 block of quicklaunch icons on a double row task bar). Clicking on an icon makes it grow into a full task bar item, which shuffles the small icons around. That's extremely bad from a usability point of view, there's no consistency.
Task bar items can be dragged around to change order, but all instances of similar programs MUST appear side by side. WTF? If I have 2 firefox windows and an IE window open, I can drag IE to be after the 2 firefox tabs, or before the 2 tabs, but I can't place it in the middle of them (firefox, IE, firefox). I've got several small icons on the left of the task bar, but if I open explorer with Windows-E, then it appears on the left and shuffles all my icons to the right.

If I have 6 seperate (not grouped together) firefox browsers on the task bar and the mouse hovers over any of them, I get a giant grey box with all 6 firefox title bars in it. That's fine if they were grouped onto one tab, but when they are all side by side already, don't show them again stacked vertically! I haven't found a way to turn that off.

Now that I've used it a bit more, the Windows 7 task bar is completely ****ing stupid. Hopefully a power toy or something will come along and fix it. I'd put up with it if it could at least freely drag any tab to any position! You know, like the firefox tab bar. Come on MS, the source code is available, take a peak!

It also runs ogre slower so far, i'm getting slightly lower fps in a bare windows 7 than I do in a fairly full vista (stuff running, etc).

At the moment I can't see a single reason for switching from vista to 7.

[_tommo_]

So, now that Windows 7 is in RC stage, what are your feelings toward the beta and RC versions today?

I formatted Vista and Ubuntu and set it as my main system.
Seriously.

So, it's possible that i don't agree with kojack

I think that the new Taskbar is just perfect, i only wanted that working program were big and smaller program small, together with a "zoom-in" thing... i wanted the Mac Dock really but this comes closer than the old bar
And this taskbar can be put to the left, wich is a great thing on 16:9 displays!

Also, i tried switching to "single click to open" and it does indeed make everything faster.

On the technical side, it correctly "sees" my 4gb ram (windows server x64 couldn't) after some hours of use all the RAM is available (usable but not just free), finally the CPU core usage graph aren't simmetrical, and i have already all the drivers for it!
And, any software i tried just worked correctly, from Visual Studio to the games... and with the latest Nvidia drivers ogre isn't so slow, while CUDA is even faster.
And there are countless little fixes all around that make the things easier!

I think that at last they got a modern SO out of Vista, this is possibily the best SO i ever tried

[Kojack]

And this taskbar can be put to the left, wich is a great thing on 16:9 displays!

So could vista, xp and all the way back to at least Windows 98 (not sure about 95, but ms support say 98 has it).

[_tommo_]

And this taskbar can be put to the left, wich is a great thing on 16:9 displays!

So could vista, xp and all the way back to at least Windows 98 (not sure about 95, but ms support say 98 has it).

Yes but it's difficult to read rotated text, and it's ugly to have a bar enough wide to contain the text
Instead the new icons are nearly squared, so they are just as good vertically.

[johnhpus]

Just wanted to chime in here and say that I installed the RC to give it a whirl, but intended to stick with XP. Unfortunately Windows 7 overwrote my boot manager so I can't get back to my XP install without some effort.

The good news though is that I have no interest in XP anymore. Windows 7 runs just as well as XP, for me, and maybe even a little better. I don't know why, but I've seen an increase from ~150 FPs to ~170 FPS on a clients project between XP/Windows 7. So far it seems like a somewhat improved XP in terms of quality and I'm very happy with it.

I would have preferred that Windows 7 be as shitty as Vista so that the MS monopoly could be broken up, but I'm happy to settle for a functional, good version of Windows instead.

And, sacrilege! -- I like the new task bar style. I despised XP's grouping of icons and thought I wouldn't like this either, but I gave it a try for a few days and I love it. I even turned off my beloved Object Dock, since the new "pin" system makes it unnecessary.

Oh well, to each his own. I remember that this machine ran Vista fine and I didn't really understand the hatred until I tried it on a laptop, where it was utter garbage.

[subquantum]

I just tried using Win7 yesterday, on a test machine at work. I do love the new taskbar, it's identical to my xfce-panel iconbox setup at home. Great for wide/dual displays (although I usually keep the XP taskbar on the side too, dispite the text alignment making me sadface). I considered Vista good "for windows", acknowledging all the little annoyances. XP is also very good "for windows", but annoying enough in little ways that I've been happier putting up with Gentoo for the past few years. But so far Win7 has actually appeared legitimately "good", not just "good for windows". I may just have to install it on my desktop when it comes out. Now, I've also only been using it for a few days, and not as my main machine, so there could be some latent evil I haven't had the misfortune of uncovering. But for now it seems like it is what they wanted Vista to be, which is worthy of praise even from a Linux "what-do-you-mean-you-hate-makefiles" zealot like myself

[Evak]

I like win7 a lot. Installed it 2 weeks ago and it runs amazingly well on my PC. I now formatted my XP partition and and uninstalled all my software in vista. Vista was ok but frustrating in some key areas.

Win7 is much more responsive, on my ageing system 3-5 year old components, single core 3000+ cpu it feels like a new computer. The transparent aero is as fast as Vista with transparency turned off, something I noticed right away, smooth and no tearing. The huge delays vista had when opening certain file dialogs is gone. Taskbar is much improved, my 10 year old colour laser printer still works, and there are modern driver versions that work with my 7800GS AGP. Something I haven't had much luck with on vista or XP for quite some time.

[jacmoe]

Thanks for the last couple reviews - I was worried that all W7 could do was give you a new taskbar. Maybe I'm installing it.
Does it solve the awful copy/delete/move files takes ages issues?

[Evak]

you know, I hadn't really noticed. Just tried copying a 300mb folder with 4,000 files in and it seems to be working better. In vista I got the impression it was copying all the files to ram or cache before it started writing to a new location. Win7 it started writing straight away. If I cancel half way though it leaves what was copied behind. Seems to work well enough.

If you install win7 RC1 it expires next spring. Windows update has daily windows defender (whatever its called) updates and seems to do a good job of keeping you informed. Don't really have any complaints at this point. Compatibility seems better than vista if anything, can even install Net 3.5 with SP1 and run the new D&D character builder that required it. Something that didn't work for me in Vista

[xavier]

you know, I hadn't really noticed. Just tried copying a 300mb folder with 4,000 files in and it seems to be working better. In vista I got the impression it was copying all the files to ram or cache before it started writing to a new location. Win7 it started writing straight away. If I cancel half way though it leaves what was copied behind. Seems to work well enough.

I wonder how many millions of complaints it took to get that stupid "feature" reworked -- I think it was actually trying to figure out how long (accurately) it would take to do the copy, which invariably took longer than just doing the actual copy itself.

[psquare]

I installed Windows 7 about 3 weeks ago. My machine is currently dual boot with XP.

I don't really have a frame of reference to compare it with Vista, since I completely skipped Vista for any serious work(intentionally), after checking it out on some other PCs.

I really like Windows 7 though. I was able to get my dev environment up and running easily. I didn't really need to pop in my motherboard cd, since it picked up the chipset automatically, alongside all other devices, including the graphics card.

Visual Studio 2008 seems to run faster somehow, than on XP (faster compile, link time, more responsive, etc). The system in general is a bit more 'responsive' as well, as Evak mentions. Ogre runs well, which is good, since my primary motivation was to work with DX 10 on a project. All the DX 10 demos from the March 2009 SDK run fine as well.

The clear type font on Windows 7is something that takes a bit of time to get used to. I can turn it off of course, but then the normal font looks 'weird' on my flat screen. I think this might be specific to my flat screen/graphics card settings. I have not looked into this further though.