Windows 7 - have you tried it?

[captain_andrey]

its all crap get a mac

And then install W7 on it!

Anyways, I hated Vista. Running W7 now and its all good. Of course now I have a quad core and 12GB of ram

[pyrocam]

dual boot it? then youll get a clean image and the ability to quickly load your old os if you break windows 7

at the sacrifice of hard drive space

[Street Gerbil]

Ok, jokes aside, are there any benefits over XP other than eye candy?
My HTPC is sufficiently specced to run W7, but it runs just fine as it is.

[Disco Dan]

What'da ya need 7 windows for? Apples are far more healthier.

[MaxCannon]

Ok, jokes aside, are there any benefits over XP other than eye candy?
My HTPC is sufficiently specced to run W7, but it runs just fine as it is.

Security is a big one. I've been deploying Vista since it was first released and have never seen a Vista machine with a virus / spyware on it.
Win 7 uses the same security principals so should be sweet in that respect.

Lots of little improvements. I find the search awesome in Vista and it's better in 7.
When I work on an XP machine it just seems so OLD !
Oh yeah - it is old.

If you have the space setup a dual boot.

[pyrocam]

if it aint broke, dont fix it

but I moved to windows 7 from XP on my primary workstation at work, I love it. considering buying for home.

[Gremlin]

Or taking an image

or a snapshot

I used Win7 in eval ages ago, virtual, but didn't really end up using it much. Having an actual release (had the RTM a while ago, but no keys, so didn't bother), its a much better test to make it interact with real hardware, the oddities of hardware/drivers etc, rather than the comfy environment of vmware etc. You also get the nice flashy features the eval didn't show in the virtual environment.

I've been making an effort not to boot in XP, so I can try to find as many issues as poss. Its certainly interesting navigating some of the more hidden features. You can clearly see some stuff hasn't changed since XP (and probably further back), and other stuff is a direct port from Vista.

Truecrypt, Winrar, VLC, virtual clonedrive etc are all running fine (usually the more odd programs, ie, not Microsoft will be the ones to catch you out). Only problem is, that unless you completely alter the interface appearance, you can't turn off services such as themes, search etc. OS (pretty much built) has over 60 processes running at idle, and using 25-35% of 3GB ram. I wouldn't suggest you would want to run this on 1GB of ram. Not quite an accurate comparison, but XP I would run on 30-40 processes, not a special version of XP, just services etc cut down.

So far the main foreseeable issue has been the Network and Sharing Centre. The classification of networks into Home Work or Public can cause issues. It would appear that unless Win7 has a default gateway on the adapter, it automatically classifies it as public, placing much tighter security on it. A real issue for VPN, as you can't force change a public network to be home or work (the option simply doesn't exist).

[Morcs]

Ill let all you guys test it for me for a bit longer...

Ive had no problems with Vista Pro, works very fast, there are no extra features which I wish it had (particularly like the complete pc backup feature) and dont find it resource hogging either, and ive got a budge system - Core 2 E7200, 2gb DDR2 etc..

[Forest]

Always do a clean install mate.

You'll get a much better result.

I was interested to see that Windows 7 doesn't include an option to upgrade from Windows XP.

If you're running XP then you can only do a format and fresh install i.e. nuke and pave.

It's probably a good thing (since XP installs normally end up filled with crap, cruft, and spyware). But it makes it harder if you want to migrate data and applications.

[vifferman]

It was installed on my 'new' computer at work yesterday. Shame that Simon buggered off after delivering it to me, and after I'd crawled around under my desk plugging in the network cable, power, monitors, mouse, keyboard and headphones, the bloody thing wouldn't go, and he was gone. Perhaps I should phone him at home...
Maybe its requisitioning as a server prior to it making it to my desk tired it out.
Bugrit - it's not like I need a PC anyway - a netbook to browse KB would do.

[sinned]

its all crap get a mac

And then install W7 on it!

Next week I will install W7 on a MacBook Pro. Best of both worlds and I can run a few PC apps on the notebook.
It has and still is a struggle learning some of the differences Apple to PC.

[DJSin]

I just upgraded to Windows 7 today - so far so good

[Forest]

Next week I will install W7 on a MacBook Pro. Best of both worlds and I can run a few PC apps on the notebook.
It has and still is a struggle learning some of the differences Apple to PC.

Be aware that Apple hasn't yet released bootcamp drivers for W7.

[NighthawkNZ:Me]

so what does it do that XP not do?????

[Gremlin]

so what does it do that XP not do?????

urrr lessee... uses more resources. Higher security so its harder to connect to various networks. Windows Update is actually useful and will also download drivers for relevant hardware.

It does warn you about various things more than XP (when you run some installers etc) and has an amusing warning now and then that say, copying from/to your other boot partition requires administrative priviledges, and do you want to do this. You click yes, and away it goes...

If you have a bunch of stuff open, say, its doing stuff and you want to check how its going. Without clicking anything, just mousing over something you can preview windows (even close them) or just return back to your work. You also have the handy snipping tool, that makes easier work of snapshotting a piece of your screen (and way easier to walk a user through the process)