50 replies to this topic

[poita]

Windows 7 was released a couple of days ago. Who has it? Any experiences you want to share?

I installed my Prof. edition last night. Overall it's a very snappy OS, although it has already managed to BSOD just staring at the desktop. The last time XP BSOD'd on me was a few years ago, so not very happy at the moment.

[imerso]

I installed the free RC on my Netbook. It runs fine, no problems yet.

[TheNut]

Heh, that's funny you bring that up. I just watched somebody's video review on performance and he was BSOD running a game.

I thought about getting it, but it's to expensive for my tastes. If they knock a hundred off the price I would strongly consider it, but for now XP and Linux are all I need. I'll probably end up waiting a year + SP1 to release along with price drops before I hop on.

[starstutter]

I have a friend who runs it on his laptop, upgraded from Vista I believe. He hasn't had any complaints so far.

[poita]

Well, I'm up to my second BSOD for today. Win7 isn't off to a good start.

[alphadog]

I have it on various (five to be exact) machines. Runs much better than Vista.

If you BSODed, did you do a clean install? (I never upgrade a Windows OS.)

The only issue I've had so far is that the Catalyst drivers seem to have some .Net dependencies that get screwed up by installing either SQL Server 2008 or VS 2008. The ATi forums cover it a little. It may be the VC++ 2008 redist, in which case as more people end up with it, ATi will eventually have to fix it.

[Wernaeh]

Currently, I'm still running Windows XP 64 Professional.

I guess Windows 7 still has that ugly Vista replace prompt when copying files around ?

Apart from that, if it is a lot faster than Vista just as Microsoft promised, I'll try it in a year or so, when there are the first service packs available.

Cheers,
- Wernaeh

[alphadog]

Windows 7's experience has been like Windows XP. A solid OS.

Think of Windows 7 like Vista SP3, and you can understand why it's pretty safe.

[imerso]

One interesting picture:

http://picasaweb.goo...358413061926434
( taken from article here: http://tech.slashdot...-Two-Windows-7s )

I would like to add that although I somewhat like Linux for all the ideology and the Unix basis etc, I really like it only as a server, or for embedded projects. For desktop development, *currently* I am of the opinion that Windows still beats by far.

Funny!

[poita]

@alphadog, yes it's a clean install on a freshly formatted HD.

I've done some searching and it appears to be related to Win7 awaking from sleep mode (which is when it has happened all 3 times).

[JarkkoL]

I have been using Win7 (64-bit, Ultimate) for about 2 months now, without any major issues really (with drivers or software). One annoying thing is the way directory browsing now works in Windows Explorer though (maybe it was the same in Vista, but I skipped straight from XP to Win7), but maybe it can be tweaked somewhere.

[roel]

I'm still running XP. Apparently I'm a conservative guy (if I had money for modern hardware and for a copy of Windows 7 things would might have been different though).

[.oisyn]

I'm waiting for my paycheck, then I'm going to buy a pair of 1TB Samsung Spinpoint F3 drives, put them in RAID 0, and then going to install Win7 on it

[Nick]

I've bought it on launch day, and I'm loving it so far.

When I had Vista the only thing keeping me from going back to XP was DirectX 10. While several service packs later stability was quite ok, it still felt like a compromise. With Windows 7 I finally got the feeling that it's a step forward on all fronts. I even believe Microsoft has held back some fixes for Vista to make 7 more compelling.

One thing I hated about Vista was that it started indexing your drives any time you did something. So when I wanted to benchmark some code I often had to wait like 10 minutes before the drives stopped ratterling. Windows 7 supports fast searching without any annoying indexing.

Something I discovered today is that it's way faster to detect USB devices as well. My wireless mouse has a receiver that is plugged into my monitor, and with Vista I had to wait an annoying 30 seconds after turning on my monitor, to be able to move the mouse. With Windows 7 it's like I never tuned off the monitor. And that's just one example of things that have become snappier.

The only thing that was less intuitive was how to get my Quick Launch icons back. There are standard icons for going to your Documents folder quickly but dobviously I want quick access to my entire drives as well. Anyway some sites already have a bunch of useful tips and tricks to customize that kind of things to your needs.

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I guess Windows 7 still has that ugly Vista replace prompt when copying files around ?

I haven't noticed any differences between the two, but why do you think it's ugly? Or are you referring to UAC? That's practically completely gone and only pops up when you're trying to do stupid things.

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One annoying thing is the way directory browsing now works in Windows Explorer though (maybe it was the same in Vista, but I skipped straight from XP to Win7), but maybe it can be tweaked somewhere.

I'm not sure if it can be tweaked, but personally I simply got used to it. In fact on my laptop with XP I sometimes miss that way of navigating. A mouse with a 'back' button is also very useful.

[poita]

.oisyn said:

I'm waiting for my paycheck, then I'm going to buy a pair of 1TB Samsung Spinpoint F3 drives, put them in RAID 0, and then going to install Win7 on it :)

Not going to try one of those new Intel SSDs that everyone raving about?

[moe]

I was forced to use Vista on my labtop since there were no more drivers for XP. It came with Vista home 32bit. It was a quite horrible experience. Crashed all over the place. Pretty much after every windows update you had to reinstall entirely. In all my previous years together I had less problems and less data loss... I then bought Vista 64 Ultimate and it ran quite stable but not very responsive. Some old games run horrible with major lag. Then I bought Win 7 64bit Ultimate pretty much when it came out. Even so the manufacture page provides some drivers there is none for the keyboard. So the keys dont work. It's actually not that much of a problem since I always have an external USB-Keyboard on which everything works fine. Still it's an annoying inconvinience. Though most of the vista drivers work for Win 7 you might want to check before you update.

Having said that, Win 7 runs much smoother and way more responsive. So far everything works great, except the keyboard... Old games like Quake run without any problems now and detecting devices is much faster as well.

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One annoying thing is the way directory browsing now works in Windows Explorer though (maybe it was the same in Vista, but I skipped straight from XP to Win7), but maybe it can be tweaked somewhere.

If you want the aero look, you are screwd. You can tweek it back to (almost) what XP was but then you dont get some of the new features. So it's either or, but not both. I agree the new directory browsing is aweful. It needs a lot getting used to.

The taskbar is now apparently called superbar. I dont think it's that super though. Essentially there are 2 changes compared to vista. The quicklaunch-bar is hidden by default and you can stick shortcuts directly and permanently to the taskbar. IMHO not really enough to call it superbar... Also the icons are either huge or there is a horrible far spacing between them. Chageing the windows metrics in the registry (MinWitdh to -255) no longer works. It does not affect the icon size anymore. But maybe I'll find another way in the future. Or I will get used to the wasted space...

It still does not have multiple desktops or any kind of skinning that would make sense. I think by looking at tools like WindowsBlinds or ObjectDock (http://www.stardock.com , no advertising intended just an example) you can clearly see that even on a Windows System it would be possible to have such features. The problem with the mentioned tools is, that they really mess up your system. So you dont actually want to use them. But if it were built into windows it would make a lot of sense and not mess up the system. I dont understand what these designers do after all these years there seams to be only little to no improvement. Considering Microsoft is the biggest company on earth that is pretty shameful. There are no essential changes that help developers along the way. From that point of view you could just stay with XP. In all fairness I have not used Tablet input devices and handwriting recognition. Maybe that works really well and there are developpers that use these things. Still not much gain.

Behind the scene however microsoft apparently did a lot. Stability and responsiveness are unmached by any other windows OS. Although I still need more time to reliably make that statement about stability. As of now the OS is just too new. Win 7 is pretty much what Vista should have been. Considering there will not be driver support on new hardware for old OS's like XP I recommand to upgrade to Win 7. Once you get used to it its actually good. Stable and fast are the most important factors anyway. There are far less services running than in Vista and from what I can tell the memory footprint has improoved as well. And maybe microsoft will learn more about user interfaces along the way.

My two cents.

Edited for typos.

[.oisyn]

poita said:

Not going to try one of those new Intel SSDs that everyone raving about?

No, I think the price per GB is still way too high for SSDs.

[Wernaeh]

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I haven't noticed any differences between the two, but why do you think it's ugly? Or are you referring to UAC? That's practically completely gone and only pops up when you're trying to do stupid things.

No, I meant the dialog box that comes up when you are about to replace a file when copying things around in the Vista Windows Explorer.

While the previous box in WinXP was really small and precise (Replace / Yes / No / Abort operation, all information at a glance) the new one has lots of text, and the German version comes with IMHO counter-intuitive descriptions as well.

What I find especially confusing is that you have to click into the middle of the box to make a choice. What happend to the UI guideline that said "If it is a push button, make it look like one" ?

Also, why does it list the file name twice, and even in bolds ? Of course the files have the same name - otherwise, the whole dialog would be meaningless.
The actually interesting attributes - size and change date, are set in non-bolds below.

Finally, why does it give me the choices "Copy" and "Don't copy" ? I'm copying a file, alright, I know this already. Better choices would be "Replace" and "Don't replace".

That said, I'm at a Vista machine at work, and up to now got accustomed to simply selecting the first option by instinct, but it still is annoying...

Cheers,
- Wernaeh

[poita]

.oisyn said:

No, I think the price per GB is still way too high for SSDs.

True, but you can always just use one as a boot drive and for your most often used applications, saving the TB+ HDs for all your media.

The prices are getting pretty good now.

[Nick]

moe said:

There are no essential changes that help developers along the way.

Considering that developers are only a minor fraction of customers it's really not that surprising that they wanted to make things simple to use for Joe Shmoe and not confuse him with advanced features. Developers and power users can still tweak it in many ways though.

Personally I have a 30" monitor, and there's absolutely no need to have multiple desktops or small icons. I guess most developers at Microsoft also have ample desktop space so there was little demand for the features you mentioned.