Windows 7 Creates a positive result for me

I've read a lot of blurb and stuff on the net about Windows7 and I'm trying the RC version. It is impressive. There are a few things that will take getting used to for sure... that's to be expected. I never put Vista on my machine (the wife swearing at it on her new laptop last year convinced me!), so I've used XP Pro for years and collected a drawer full of discs to load progs for mouse, keyboard, printers, scanners, sound - you name it... But with Windows 7RC I didn't use them. It was all built in.

Like the clean look and feel and the tranparent border to open windows. Well done MS!

With the RC version xp is stored as windows.old but when new arrives in October I will format the disc first. If you want to try it, check your antivirus will work BEFORE you load Windows7. I'm enjoying a 30-day trial with AVG for now - looking good.

Amazing to see how much of Firefox is now in Explorer 8 - still prefer 'the fox' and 'thunderbird' wins hands down for me.

Join the club! The best quote about it I heard was, "Its what vista should have been"!

I have been using Win7 since the RC was released, doing a lot of testing and such for my web site.

The only thing I dislike about it is the explorer that has been turned in to libraries. I can not get used to them. I like a folder with the programs and short cuts I want and not all the other junk added to it.

So if anyone knows a work around the librraries I would love to know how to -

Make an empty folder
Use the explorer like with XP

If not then Win7 will be another Vista as far as I am concerned.

Hate to say that but XP works and doesn't need to be 'Super' tweeked to run in less than 100 meg of memory.

My $0.000002

Rider200 said:

Hate to say that but XP works and doesn't need to be 'Super' tweeked to run in less than 100 meg of memory.

Click to expand...

I'm curious as to what "un-tweaked" XP you're running, because I've never seen any version XP use that little memory unless it is nLite'd. Also, WTF is the point of memory if you're not going to use it? Superfetch pre-caching is Vista's best feature, IMHO. Vista uses nearly 7 GiB out of my 8 GiB to store applications before I run them, so that they start faster than anything will ever start on your "100MB" XP system. If I can get it cheap, I'll upgrade to Windows 7, but Vista is already a great OS for me.

Lately I've been considering building a PC to play my games on. Looks like with Win7 just over the horizon I might wait until it comes out. By then DDR3 memory and other components will drop in price, too.

Throughout Windows' chequered history I would have much preferred to see a basic OS at a knock down price which included downloadable option packs, a limited number of which would be included in the purchase price. This would have avoided the perennial problem of OS clutter that's not wanted and never used.

However, I'm no Bill Gates and we all must be thankful to MS for getting us out of writing lines of Basic code on a black background...

So we spend a w/e fine tuning our OS's adding languages etc removing outlook - as I've done. So be it. The alternative doesn't bear thinking about.IMO But W7 is great, it's not perfect, but its the best we got NOW.

petteyg359 said:

I'm curious as to what "un-tweaked" XP you're running, because I've never seen any version XP use that little memory unless it is nLite'd. Also, WTF is the point of memory if you're not going to use it? Superfetch pre-caching is Vista's best feature, IMHO. Vista uses nearly 7 GiB out of my 8 GiB to store applications before I run them, so that they start faster than anything will ever start on your "100MB" XP system. If I can get it cheap, I'll upgrade to Windows 7, but Vista is already a great OS for me.

Click to expand...

werd

XP Pro SP3 will run at 98 meg when installed and unnecessary servies turned off. No apps installed.

On a laptop with 500 Meg of ram this is necessay.

I put Win7 on the same laptop and it used 478 meg before turning of 67 of the 130+ services that are unnecessay. No apps installed.

So WTF we all can't have expensive systems all the time.

Eh?

Pre Fetch is no good on a system that doesn't have the memory. So anyone get Win7 down to less than 250 Meg? No apps installed? I can't and I worked on it for a week off an on.

MHO...

Rider200 said:

Pre Fetch is no good on a system that doesn't have the memory. So anyone get Win7 down to less than 250 Meg? No apps installed? I can't and I worked on it for a week off an on.

Click to expand...

That system with so little memory likely has a slow disk to start with. Would you rather load everything off the disk all the time or have Superfetch load it in advance for you? You are aware that it frees memory if an app requests it, right? Your apps aren't suddenly limited to 22 MiB, just like mine aren't limited to 1547 MiB.

petteyg359 said:

I'm curious as to what "un-tweaked" XP you're running, because I've never seen any version XP use that little memory unless it is nLite'd. Also, WTF is the point of memory if you're not going to use it? Superfetch pre-caching is Vista's best feature, IMHO. Vista uses nearly 7 GiB out of my 8 GiB to store applications before I run them, so that they start faster than anything will ever start on your "100MB" XP system. If I can get it cheap, I'll upgrade to Windows 7, but Vista is already a great OS for me.

Click to expand...

+1. I would have jumped on the W7 pre-order, but personally I am not too fond of upgrade versions. I am hoping that my parts distributor will have some kind of deal for me on the OEM full install. I don't necessarily need Ultimate, I think Home Premium would be plenty for what I do.

Rider200 said:

I have been using Win7 since the RC was released, doing a lot of testing and such for my web site.

The only thing I dislike about it is the explorer that has been turned in to libraries. I can not get used to them. I like a folder with the programs and short cuts I want and not all the other junk added to it.

So if anyone knows a work around the librraries I would love to know how to -

Make an empty folder
Use the explorer like with XP

If not then Win7 will be another Vista as far as I am concerned.

Hate to say that but XP works and doesn't need to be 'Super' tweeked to run in less than 100 meg of memory.

My $0.000002

Click to expand...

Have the libraries point to the folders you want to store your info in. Pretty easy, hell I abuse the hell out of libraries for all sorts of things. I have 2 large hardrives, and music and movies and other things on both hard drives, but with libraries. It shows both folders of music from each hard drive in one explorer, but tells me which is from which.