Windows 7 - Not a question thread, an answer one instead.

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Windows 7 - Not a question thread, an answer one instead.

Post by ~El~Jefe~ » Sun Oct 25, 2009 5:02 pm

If you have xp and your machine is 64 bit capable and you have 2 gigs of ram:

chuck xp. chuck it in the garbage or use it on another machine. but you dont have another one as that makes a massive amount more noise than one, so just chuck it.

Why? there has nothing I have done in Windows7 that hasnt been faster than xp. all functions, all games, all transfering files, all DOWNLOADING, yes my sustained speed is better, how why not sure but clearly is and I have dedicated bandwidth so it's easy to test.

Looks better, yes, makes more sense, yes: taskbar peek is great. takes up more resources? Um. well if you mean that would make something slower, I just said everything on it is faster so that's a no. I run 64 bit Pro. I highly suggest 4 gigs and 64bit pro. I wanted 8 but it wont boot right on my mobo for some reason so im using 4.

File system is simple and makes sense, has its own firewall, doesnt crash constantly (I lied to myself that xp was stable, it just didnt need to be rebooted after a crash, that's no stable)

Student upgrade version is both upgrade and full blank install, so 30 bucks.... went a long way!

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Post by tehcrazybob » Sun Oct 25, 2009 9:59 pm

I felt the same way after switching to Vista. Yes, a new operating system takes a while to get used to, and yes, running them at the minimum system requirements is never a good idea. On the other hand, if you've got a decently powerful system, you get to take advantage of all the neat new tricks (including halfway competent memory management, introduced in Vista and improved in 7). The overall result is that while an old computer might be faster on the older OS, a modern system may actually run faster on the newer software.

Of course, it could also just be that we're comparing old, bogged-down installs of XP to fresh, shiny installs of newer systems.

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Post by ntavlas » Sun Oct 25, 2009 10:58 pm

Of course, it could also just be that we're comparing old, bogged-down installs of XP to fresh, shiny installs of newer systems.

Yes, it`s a common mistake, but I`m having the luxury of comparing 7 to a recent, optimized xp installation. While there are some times that the extra overhead is felt, 7 does a quite a few things faster. To be fair, XP has been pretty ok in terms of stability, usually it`s 3rd party applications crashing and the os can`t do much to prevent that from happenning. For some reason however 7 does feel more robust, maybe because the applications/drivers written for it get more attention?. Anyway, I like 7 and it`s a bit more tidy out of the box than Vista.

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Post by ~El~Jefe~ » Mon Oct 26, 2009 5:34 pm

xp is not fast. overhead is meaningless if you look at what is in your ram. That just sits there hanging out. 4 gigs ram, e8400 proc and a new raid class TByte drive.

Xp handles crashes in a bad way. It basically goes into retard mode till you reboot it.

I reinstall xp 2x a year.

Vista is as slow as crap. I tried it today on a similar machine and it was like wading through sewage.

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Post by ntavlas » Mon Oct 26, 2009 6:06 pm

I`m not reffering to the increased ram usage but to the increased size of the OS. At times there`s increased disk access something expected considering that 7 is more than 3 times the size of xp. I still haven`t spent a lot of time on 7 though so it`s not a fair comparison, even vista can become low-end-pc friendly after you put a bit of effort into it.

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Post by alecmg » Tue Oct 27, 2009 1:50 am

Windows 7 improved on Vista and XP...
Well it just proves that MS products are generally crap to begin with.

That said, I use Win7 for gaming now. Yippie, it handles video card driver crashes silently with just a short black screen and resumes gameplay.
But hey, such crashes occur 4 times more often than under XP!
And it takes up 10 gigs of space for no reason. In SSD age, HDD footprint DOES matter

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Post by porkchop » Tue Oct 27, 2009 2:56 am

i recently took the leap to make my own xp install cd with nlite, the result: a 185mb(iso) unattended install of xppro sp2. i tested it on an old 80gb ide hdd, it installed in 10 minutes!
i can't really tell if its any faster, but i certainly get the illusion of a newer, faster os :D.

the others make a good point about the footprint too- i'm currently looking at a 64gb ssd. trim be damned!

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Post by Vicotnik » Tue Oct 27, 2009 4:12 am

~El~Jefe~ wrote:xp is not fast. overhead is meaningless if you look at what is in your ram. That just sits there hanging out. 4 gigs ram, e8400 proc and a new raid class TByte drive.

Xp handles crashes in a bad way. It basically goes into retard mode till you reboot it.

I reinstall xp 2x a year.
I never reinstall XP, or almost never anyway. Kind of have to when I switch motherboard every once in a while. My RAM just hangs out, get's used as disk cache when I need it. I use a small RAM disk, no swap. Works great for what I use my computer for. I run a very tight system, usually about 18 processes running after boot according to Process Explorer.
How XP handles crashes I really don't know since my system never crashes. ;) Or almost never anyway, I did have some stability problems with RMClock a while back but that is to be expected when one explores the limits of undervolting.

My point is that while Win7 is good for many people I don't think it's for everyone.

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Post by JVM » Tue Oct 27, 2009 5:52 am

I liked XP, went to Vista and liked that better, and now have Windows 7 and like that better. But, there are a few things that bug me about Windows 7, just two things for the most part:

1. The Control Panel. Why did they change it from Vista is beyond me. I prefer the old style Control Panel in Vista.

2. What happened to Windows Mail? I liked Windows Mail and used it. Now, in Windows 7, they give nothing. So, I have spent days trying Thunderbird, Windows Live Mail, Windows Live Hotmail, and Eudora before finally deciding on Thunderbird.

3. Windows 7 is supposed to disable SuperFetch and ReadyBoost with SSD drives, but they have not been disabled with my Intel X25-M G2 160GB with TRIM.

Anyway, I like Windows 7 better than any previously installed OS, and I guess that is the bottom line.

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Post by audiojar » Tue Oct 27, 2009 2:06 pm

alecmg wrote:Windows 7 improved on Vista and XP...
Well it just proves that MS products are generally crap to begin with.
So if the new Windows improves on the old version that just proves that the old one was crap? So not improving on an old version proves the old version was perfect? It sounds like you just want to bash MS and don't care about how or why.

Windows 7 is different from most previous releases in that it has much less problems at the time of release. That's why it's getting such fan fair and good press. Sure, MS should have released all it's versions in a state that is as good as 7, but that doesn't really take away from the fact that 7 is a solid OS and there is no reason to wait like there was in the past.

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Post by andyb » Tue Oct 27, 2009 3:51 pm

That's why it's getting such fan fair and good press. Sure, MS should have released all it's versions in a state that is as good as 7, but that doesn't really take away from the fact that 7 is a solid OS and there is no reason to wait like there was in the past.
There are 2 reasons why its getting good reviews.

1, Its better than Vista (not a hard task, its exactlywhat Vista should have been all along).

2, Its been a long time since XP was released so MS made sure that it was polihed and bug free from day one (unlike XP and Vista), they simply couldnt afford to have another OS that few people liked, and that many had problems with.

Well done MS.


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Post by nutball » Wed Oct 28, 2009 12:41 am

JVM wrote:1. The Control Panel. Why did they change it from Vista is beyond me. I prefer the old style Control Panel in Vista.
^ This. The Vista control panel was far from perfect, but replacing a bunch of icons with a bloody essay doesn't seem like a step forward to me. Maybe I'll get used to it.

I wish the control panels in Windows OSs were a bit more configurable. There's a whole bunch of options I never use (probably 75%) and I'd like to be able to remove. I know there are third-party tweak apps to do this, but they don't cover everything and in any case it should be part of the OS itself IMO.

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Post by swivelguy2 » Wed Oct 28, 2009 5:27 am

Windows 7 is currently making me very happy. It has eliminated several annoyances that I had with Vista, and Aero Peek is pretty useful. I can tolerate 7 with Aero turned on, which is something for which Vista never had the performance on my laptop.

Sure, XP is lighter and simpler. However, some XP users seem to have really dug their heels in deep. Could anything ever come out that would make you trust Microsoft to produce an operating system again?

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Post by kittle » Thu Oct 29, 2009 1:07 pm

Im contemplating taking the plunge from XP to Win7 and also from Vista to Win7.
I run vista on my laptop, which is only 1yr old and it runs pretty good with aero off, but I seriously miss the XP start menu.. having to 'search' for everything drives me batty.

On my desktop, i run xp 64-bit with 6gb of ram and it runs just fine for what I do.

Neither system has any stability or crash-related issues. my desktop is 5yrs old and still has the origional xp64 install on it. Its bluescreened a few times, but that was due to a failing soundcard.
The laptop has never bluescreened or crashed at all.

Keeping current is good.. but im suffering from the "if it aint broke, dont fix it" syndrome.

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Post by audiojar » Thu Oct 29, 2009 9:03 pm

kittle wrote:Im contemplating taking the plunge from XP to Win7 and also from Vista to Win7.
I run vista on my laptop, which is only 1yr old and it runs pretty good with aero off, but I seriously miss the XP start menu.. having to 'search' for everything drives me batty.
Well you are solidly in the minority on that one. It's very quick and easy to hit the windows key and then type the first few letters of what you want. All of your most used programs will be pinned to the task bar anyway.

I think it's a case of nostalgia rather than the XP start menu being better in any way.

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Post by Shamgar » Wed Nov 04, 2009 9:53 am

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Last edited by Shamgar on Tue Jul 20, 2010 7:54 am, edited 2 times in total.

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Post by defaultluser » Wed Nov 04, 2009 10:16 pm

I just upgraded from XP to Windows 7 64 this past week. With 4GB ram and dual-core, the system was ripe for a new OS. Since I was using my old GP 750GB as my boot drive, I decided to spend $200 on an SSD (got an OCZ Vertex 60GB).

What an impressive upgrade! The SSD makes all my programs load lightning-fast, and the Aero environment is really slick and easy to use. I love that they finally made it easy to have two apps split the screen (used to have to mess around with right-click taskbar to do this sort of thing). I like how they merged the taskbar and the quicklaunch bar. It's just a smooth experience overall.

And thanks to TRIM, the performance of the SSD never falters, no matter how much I write to the drive. TRIM also works automatically, so to me, the SSD is finally in a usable state.

And yeah, you really can install a lot on 60GB. When I originally specced this SSD upgrade, I asked myself how much space I was wasting with games and apps I could uninstall. With 7 I just have four games installed (TF2, Borderlands, Oblivion, TrackMania), plus all my apps, and still have almost 20GB free. I have the GP 750GB monster for media, so I have plenty of space.

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Post by mr. poopyhead » Wed Nov 04, 2009 10:24 pm

win7 is definitely an improvement over XP... but like i still find nothing about it so compelling that would make me chuck XP if i hadn't received win7 for free from my school. i am just as happy now as i was a month ago running XP.

it's like when cars come out with a "new" model that isn't the next gen... it's really just new tail lights, headlights and a revamped dashboard...

now the super-geeks might start talking about how win7 is a VAST improvement under the hood, but as someone who's just assessing this based on reading emails, surfing the net, and playing some games, i find no significant improvement in my experience of those activities. win7 may be a few seconds faster? who knows... again, nothing compelling enough for me to have purchased this retail...
there has nothing I have done in Windows7 that hasnt been faster than xp
i disagree... i was going through a folder of 4000 of my vacation pics, and win7 is painfully slow when selecting something like "sort by date"... every time i copied a few files to another folder, it would take 20 seconds or so for the folder to refresh... i have no idea what it's doing, but there's a progress bar at the top.

maybe i'm doing something wrong in win7, but i can't remember ever having that much trouble in XP explorer.

i think a more fair comparison, would be a fresh XP install and fresh win7 install... i have a feeling most people here may be comparing an old sluggish install of XP with a million processes and services that start up when booting... a fresh format and install is always faster than the old installation.

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Post by ~El~Jefe~ » Wed Nov 04, 2009 10:32 pm

Vicotnik wrote:
~El~Jefe~ wrote:xp is not fast. overhead is meaningless if you look at what is in your ram. That just sits there hanging out. 4 gigs ram, e8400 proc and a new raid class TByte drive.

Xp handles crashes in a bad way. It basically goes into retard mode till you reboot it.

I reinstall xp 2x a year.
I never reinstall XP, or almost never anyway. Kind of have to when I switch motherboard every once in a while. My RAM just hangs out, get's used as disk cache when I need it. I use a small RAM disk, no swap. Works great for what I use my computer for. I run a very tight system, usually about 18 processes running after boot according to Process Explorer.
How XP handles crashes I really don't know since my system never crashes. ;) Or almost never anyway, I did have some stability problems with RMClock a while back but that is to be expected when one explores the limits of undervolting.

My point is that while Win7 is good for many people I don't think it's for everyone.
I dont think you really use your computer for much. If you did, you would see the terrible way xp handles gaming and things like video and audio driver updates. It gets slower every reboot or install/uninstall. 18 processes means that some programs and functionality would be blocked. I had it like that, load something complex for my hobby use for radio and it would fry until I turned on like 10 processes. Win7 you dont need to turn a blessed thing off, it is very smooth. Also, xp 64 is pants, so one needs win7 for 64 bit/above 3 gigs ram usage. I could have 45 processes running in windows 7 and still have more available ram than 12 processes in xp!

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Post by ~El~Jefe~ » Wed Nov 04, 2009 10:34 pm

mr. poopyhead wrote:win7 is definitely an improvement over XP... but like i still find nothing about it so compelling that would make me chuck XP if i hadn't received win7 for free from my school. i am just as happy now as i was a month ago running XP.

it's like when cars come out with a "new" model that isn't the next gen... it's really just new tail lights, headlights and a revamped dashboard...

now the super-geeks might start talking about how win7 is a VAST improvement under the hood, but as someone who's just assessing this based on reading emails, surfing the net, and playing some games, i find no significant improvement in my experience of those activities. win7 may be a few seconds faster? who knows... again, nothing compelling enough for me to have purchased this retail...
there has nothing I have done in Windows7 that hasnt been faster than xp
i disagree... i was going through a folder of 4000 of my vacation pics, and win7 is painfully slow when selecting something like "sort by date"... every time i copied a few files to another folder, it would take 20 seconds or so for the folder to refresh... i have no idea what it's doing, but there's a progress bar at the top.

maybe i'm doing something wrong in win7, but i can't remember ever having that much trouble in XP explorer.

i think a more fair comparison, would be a fresh XP install and fresh win7 install... i have a feeling most people here may be comparing an old sluggish install of XP with a million processes and services that start up when booting... a fresh format and install is always faster than the old installation.
2 gigs is too small for windows7. what makes it faster is the usage of large amounts of ram to speed up life. Ram is cheap, so are hookers in the Bronx, buy them both is what I do.

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Post by mr. poopyhead » Thu Nov 05, 2009 8:52 am

~El~Jefe~ wrote:
mr. poopyhead wrote:... blah blah blah ...
2 gigs is too small for windows7. what makes it faster is the usage of large amounts of ram to speed up life. Ram is cheap, so are hookers in the Bronx, buy them both is what I do.
well i was hearing all this stuff about win7 being great even on netbooks (typically 1GB RAM)... so i figured 2 GB should be plenty...

and again, that goes right along with my whole point... there's nothing in win7 that would really convince me to pay for the thing AND upgrade my memory just to get some pretty insignificant benefits.

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Post by ~El~Jefe~ » Sat Nov 14, 2009 10:35 am

there is a lighter version of win7 that runs fine on 1 gig. i have a 2 gig netbook, toshiba (best one out, hardware and upgrade wise)

But, I dont see a need for win7 on a netbook if xp is free and win7 isnt. Not really doing anything graphical or fun on a netbook besides very old games or whatever.

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Post by greenfrank » Wed Nov 25, 2009 6:48 pm

I tested windows 7 on a nettop (atom330, 2gb ram), and yes, it runs quite well (install very fast) and has a nice look too, but is definitively slower than XP sp3 (i have a recorted and tuned version of it). Windows 7 consumes a lot of resources, too many for "frugal" PCs.

For now, I'll stay with XP. Solid OS, fast and trustworthy. Anyway, I need basically an OS to run Office and Firefox. XP performs very well.

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