Curious about Windows 7

[MADxMrMike]

I just wanted to know if anyone has bothered to check out Windows 7 Beta yet. If you've tinkered with it lately let me know. I have 80 GB drive gathering dust and I was thinking about installing it to check it out.

[biosc1]

It's good. Give it a try. Quick install. Nothing much more to say about it, really. As a beta, it's much better than I thought it would be.

You can even get Visual Studio up and running without issue...all our products run fine. Not really a surprise considering it builds on the Vista platform.

[opusdeath]

What does it add to Vista in terms of functionality?

[ruumis]

I installed it on an older Dell workstation (1.7GHz Intel Xeon with 1GB RAM and an NVIDIA Quadro2 Pro w/64 MB). This went fine, except for the fact that the old on-board network interface was not recognized. Also, it got a whopping 1.0 score on the “Windows Experience Index.” I guess that video card just can't hang with the Aero eye candy.

Rather than play around with mixing and matching drivers from various versions of Windows, I decided to scrap the idea and install on slightly newer hardware. Another Dell workstation (2.8GHz Xeon with 1.5GB RAM and an NVIDIA QuadroFX 500 w/128MB). This was enough for Aero, and bumped me up to a somewhat more respectable 3.0 Windows Experience Index score. All hardware devices were supported out of the box except the sound, which was fixed after running Windows Update and rebooting.

I have to say, I'm very impressed. As someone who uses Ubuntu Linux, OSX Leopard and Windows XP heavily on the desktop, I have played around with a great number of user interfaces. I like Windows 7's interface more than KDE4, and probably as much as Leopard and GNOME 2.24. I love being able to “pin” stuff to the task bar. And the compositing window manager is a very nice touch. The overall speed is very impressive as well, much better than Vista.

Definitely a step in the right direction. I recommend trying it out if you have decent enough spare hardware.

[MADxMrMike]

Ok first off you guys are awesome! LOL. I didn't expect a reply so fast. Second I'm dling it when I get home. You guys got me a little excited about it. I didn't expect the positive posts.

[zipR]

What does it add to Vista in terms of functionality?

I don't know if it adds much (you can find plenty of reviews online), but I think it takes away the (unjustly) cursed Vista name.

[pwnophobia]

I have it installed on a dual core machine w/ 2GB of RAM, fresh install was 40 minutes. Found 100% of my drivers, indexed all my items on my machine very quickly. All Vista programs work on it, was able to connect to a domain and tinker with it. So far it runs better than Vista does out of the box!

There really isn't much to say about it, it's basically a better Vista.

[swiftdraw]

I wonder what the gaming support is going to be like.

[Shela Monster]

Ok first off you guys are awesome! LOL. I didn't expect a reply so fast. Second I'm dling it when I get home. You guys got me a little excited about it. I didn't expect the positive posts.

I've had it for a while, being part of a MSDN subscriber is sweet. I can tell you it runs a hell of a lot faster than Vista.

I would call it a XP/Vista hybrid. with the Eye Candy of Vista, but with the performance and reliability of XP.

I think Windows 7 will receive *much* greater support than Vista.

~Shela Monster
(Mad, Check your PMs!)

[Furious Wang]

I'm not so sure that its as much "better than vista" as much as it is people wanting it to be better than vista. Vista was a train wreck and I think a lot of people are looking for an excuse to keep faith in Microsoft.

Personally, I'm still using XP on my gaming rig and Ubuntu on my laptop. Neither Vista nor 7 give me any incentive to change that.

[blackzc]

Its good, its supposed to run apps faster or as fast and be as light as XP. Widows media gadget is cool. and the new toolbar works good. I installed one game, BF2. It loaded a map what seemed like 40% faster.

[Primus]

I don't know if it adds much (you can find plenty of reviews online), but I think it takes away the (unjustly) cursed Vista name.

Yeah the name change is the big difference, and it seems to have worked.

[GaymerFreek09]

Vista was a complite desaster I wont ever use it because its such a big pile of shit, If Window 7 is an improvement upon vista I ASK how do you improve upon Shit ?

[Mr. Lake]

Vista was a complite desaster I wont ever use it because its such a big pile of shit, If Window 7 is an improvement upon vista I ASK how do you improve upon Shit ?

Your comment is clever. How you managed to post it using whatever archaic OS you cling to is beyond my will to reason.

[evilgoodwin]

I still haven't had trouble with Vista. No problems whatsoever. Works with my hardware just fine, everything was supported, and it has only crashed on me when some hardware broke. Not vista's fault, just went too cheap on DVD drive.
I feel like most of the vista hate is just people parroting something they heard from someone else who may be hating on it because it's a Microsoft product. But oh well.
I do want to try out windows 7, though, but I want to get another HD up for it first.

[Gusj]

I've been thinking about trying the beta myself for some time. I need to get rid of the pirated version of XP I use now anyway since I'm constantly being harassed by the Genuine Validation-thingy they added some years ago. I've also messed up the registry and made all my usb-ports non-writable which sucks when I use mostly external hard drives.

There's one thing that's keeping me from upgrading though, and that is all the stuff that's stuck on my internal hard drive now (game saves etc). Is it possible to upgrade without wiping the hard drive? If so I will probably upgrade as soon as I get hold of a writable dvd.

[privatedonut21]

I loaded Windows 7 onto my laptop to give it a run and a few days after that I put on my desktop to try out some of the Media Center functionality. I have been using it exclusively since then.

It takes all of the improvements that Vista introduced over XP and combines it with the reliability and light feel of XP. They've done a great job of cutting out some of the bloat included with Vista originally, for instance the new, lighter Media Player is great (though I still prefer VLC). The new taskbar is fantastic, sort of a taskbar/dock love child.

There are a lot of other things I love about it, but the best way to describe is it's just smarter. Everything they tried just turned out better. I'd highly suggest giving it a try, I think you'll find yourself enjoying the comfortably familiar Vista-esque feel of 7, while appreciating the improvements that 7 introduces.

[MasterEvilAce]

Using Windows 7 on my main machine. I love it. I skipped over the Vista generation, so I don't know what's different so much between vista and Win7... I'm a die-hard XP fan, but after having Windows 7 for probably a month now... Honestly, I don't want to go back to XP. It's just about a bunch of small little changes that I love. Being able to reposition the system tray icons, the user taskbar setup is amazing. If you're transferring files, the taskbar icon literally becomes a progressbar of sorts. Little things like that. A really nice package. It's pretty quick as well.

The main downside with the beta are, again, little things for the most part. I've submitted plenty of feedback, hopefully they listen. The biggest problem I've run into is Windows Media Player. the "now playing" mode is ugly (text rendering is terrible), feature-lacking, and video play back is TERRIBLE. If WMP isn't the active window, it goes out of sync and lags badly. A lot of times the video stops updating altogether. I just use VLC Player because of it.

Win7 has a lot of awesome things coming to it as well. It comes with lots of drivers out of the box. It comes with DIVX so most videos play w/o downloading anything. Support for .MOV (including quicktime?) is supposedly coming as well.

[Baron Phineas Gifford]

I really want to install it and I have the beta code but lost the install file. I really don't want to torrent it. I'm always nervous about torrenting Microsoft programs. Anyone know of a site were I can get it?

[Virtuoso]

I really want to install it and I have the beta code but lost the install file. I really don't want to torrent it. I'm always nervous about torrenting Microsoft programs. Anyone know of a site were I can get it?

You shouldn't be worried about torrenting it. Active torrents with no negative comments are OK about 99.9% of the time.

[Gusj]

As long as you've got a valid cd-key you shouldn't be too worried about torrenting it, at least not this beta which is pretty open. And finding a virus-free torrent shouldn't be too hard if you know where to look.

Anyway, I thought it was still possible to download it from Microsoft when you have a valid cd-key? I'm probably wrong though.

Edit: I just realised my first sentence is nearly exactly the same Virtuoso wrote.

[Jotoco]

In case people don't know, they are still issuing cd-keys.

The only thing is, you need to torrent it.

I downloaded the torrent and installed, had it for the weekend. i LIKE it.

I think many things could be better, like, it didn't let me install my sound drivers because it though they were not signed. And other minor nitpicks.

Overall, an improvement.

[eth3rton]

How do you go about getting a Win7 key. I just downloaded it last night and want to give it a try.

edit : Nevermind found it.