Be Excellent To Each Other

Ooh, I'm still doing the boring old 'backing up files onto USB, transferring them onto laptop' rigramole. Tell me, is it everything they ever promised? Is it minty fresh?

Also, does it come with internet explorer and Firefox et al, or do I have to farcically install it from a USB stick?

I've been running it on my desktop at work pretty much since the RTM came out, and have had it kicking around for testing since the beta, so it's hardly new to me But I've got it at home now, anyway. And it's aces and brilliant and all that - it's Vista, except less annoying. And XP, except with a UI that's not a decade out of date and with a vastly better process scheduler. Nothing's failed so far.

Yes, mine came with IE, and I don't even recall seeing a browser select screen thing like they promised, but then the first thing I did was to install Opera anyway so there's every chance I missed it.

Installed last night, impressions:

Easy to install, saved all my old files under 'Windows Old', so I didn't have to spend hours copying everything onto another laptop at all, for example! Which I did. Garn.

Recognised everything, so no problems with drivers - phew.

Windows Live manages to be a pain already, refusing to let me log in, even though I'm blatently using the right name. Asks to upgrade to newer version, which is a bit rum since it's the one I automatically downloaded.

Haven't tried any games on it yet, loaded up Company of Heroes with the disc in the tray but it wants to do its absurd patching process and doesn't seem to want to let me play the game without patching full stop now, even though the CD's there. Bah.

Media Player is lovely, yum. Don't know how to set pretty but pointless but pretty visualisations yet though. Better than WinMedPlay 10, for shure.

Moving windows about is fun. Shakey-clickey!

Not sure about the pin bar yet, and it's going to take me a while to get used to the differences to XP. A good while. Still, rather impressed.

Tends to freeze a bit for a few seconds, though I think this is due to mass updating.

I don't know if it's my brain fooling me to justify the 64 quid but colours seem more detailed and richer, and the sound better.

Overall, not party worthy but jolly nice. Loads quick too!

After a fashion, I am now running with the Windows 7 bulls.

Initial impressions: Quite good, with a few qualifiers. Seeing as I own a Dell PC less than 20 months old (costing around £600, without a monitor), you might reasonably expect it to install and run the 64-bit version of Win 7 without any major qualms. And, as first appearances went, it did. Yay, and no more 3GB-glass ceiling for me, you might think, as I quite wrongly did. But no. After about six hours of trying to get everything just how I'd liked it, it soon became clear that Win7-64 was just too much of a memory hog (at least on my setup). Having nothing more complicated than Firefox 3.5.3, Tweetdeck and Calculator running seemed to take up about 2.8GB, and seeing as I've only got 3GB at the moment, that's a bit annoying.

Much of today being taken up with a 32-bit Win7 re-install seems to have solved many of the problems. Right now, I'm rocking Thunderbird, Firefox, Tweetdeck, iTunes and quite a few background processes, and everything is swimming along happily at under 70% of my available memory, with no slowdown. One quite big annoyance is that my headphones no longer seem to do anything when plugged into the 'headphone' socket (other than muting the speakers), which is quite annoying. Possibly, I've messed something up. If I haven't, then a pretty fundamental 'boo' for Win7.

Overall, and ignoring the headphones issue in case I've missed something, pretty good so far. 73%.

are you sure it is windows and not your dell drivers? Have you installed all the drivers you need?

don't you feel silly now!

Have you tried flashing your BIOS?

I wish people would stop it with the "It's a memory hog" shit.

So what if something takes up 2.8 out of 3GB of memory? As long as nothing else is using it, what difference does it make? I'd rather the apps/OS I'm currently running actually uses the RAM I've got rather than let 2GB go to waste.

As long as it frees up the RAM when other applications request it, where's the problem?

I thought the 32bit version of 7 was able to address more than 3gb of RAM?

it's not using that memory for no reason. It's aggressively caching the hard disk using RAM that isn't in use for anything else. This is a good thing.

Unless they've started using PAE (which is a horrible hack anyway) then it can't do, because it's a hardware limitation. Are you thinking of the fact that it reports the correct memory? For example, if you had 4Gb fitted, Vista would often report something like "3.25Gb", which freaked people out. Under WIn7 I think that is reported as 4Gb, but the addressable memory space is the same as it was under Vista.

Bawls. Looks like it's 64 bit for me. Currently backing stuff up to my external drives in preparation. 6 hours remaining in Microsoft Minutes.

what are you upgrading from?

Word of advice. Loads and loads of my friends have installed W7 and complained it was eating memory. Most of them wiped it.

There are, however, about 600mb worth of updates for it that you must install before you can expect it to work correctly on some set ups which should resolve your memory/crawling/slowness problems.

who does not run the updates?

Lots of people who thought they would finally get a Microsoft OS that worked out of the box? I mean tbh that was the entire premise of 7 in the first place, to correct the horrid mistake that was Vista. You're right of course, but I think some people hoped a little too high hehe.

i don't think there has been any OS that was final when released. Plus win 7 has been out for months so anything identified would need patching

True, but look at the enormous beta testing thing they did this time around to try and knock out the problems. TBH? it should have been done. But hey, as I say you're right, most of us would remember to think updates.

it was done, then they released win7 on msdn. So more live testing was done, plus security updates should always be done.

i think the updates are automatic now.

It does make me laugh how some people chase numbers that don't matter, especially if they don't understand the reasons behind the numbers themselves in the first place.

I don't give a shit how much of my RAM Windows uses up, unless things start getting really slow. I have seen no instance of this under Windows 7. Though to be fair, it's only using up 33% of my 4GB anyway at the moment. If it rose to 80%, I won't care if I see no loss of performance.

Personally I'd be glad they're patching stuff already and anyway XP has been around for years & it's still being patched & still needs patching.

I haven't, but I'm still having a party.

I love that new advert where the woman says she invented the launch bar.

LOL I bet Apple will be super fucking pissed at that.

And quite possibly the good people who designed Risc OS

This was the most rushed OS release MS have ever done. Everyone was expecting another RC, but it didn't happen.

Win7 64bit doesn't use all the 3GB in the laptop I installed it on, even as disk cache. Certainly not with just a few things running.

The only issue I have is that it takes a fucking age to log in.

Seems fine on my desktop, fortunately. I'm still always pleasantly surprised how quickly Win7 shuts down, though.

I win 7 so far. Only used it for the Media Center [sic] parts, but it seems delightfully speedy.

Both my computers, one 32bit and the other 64bit, are the same. Even disabling HomeGroups and some other bits. Network peculiarity maybe.

I am Windows 7ed up. Had a Massive Panic when Thunderbird started being a bitch when manually importing my mail.

Has to be a timeout in a login script or something, like a slow NETBIOS or DNS name resolution.

Hm, they do both refuse to talk to my DNS-323 properly - in Vista and XP it was \\nas, but Win7 insists it's \\dns-323 and while it'll show the top-level folders they're all empty. Yet \\ipaddress is fine.

So maybe it's trying to catalogue LAN connections or something before logging in.

Can I just say how impressed I am that the installation Just Worked. At no point have I had to scrabble around for drivers. Microsoft: B+ for effort.

O RLY? Interesting. I daresay I'll see the same problems. I've never had very reliable NETBIOS resolution at home though, all my muscle memory is around using IP addresses. My DNS-323 is on a static IP.

There really shouldn't be much chat going on as part of the logon process on a local machine, especially to an extent that would delay things like rendering the explorer shell.

Have a look at the system event log. Events from the Service Control Manager are all the services starting up - look at the timestamps and work out which one is taking longest, that should give you a few hints.

Have you tried flashing your NETBIOS?

Hm. This 64bit one actually heavily accesses the HDD right up until the Welcome screen fades out to desktop, unlike the (slower) 32bit one.

I am enjoying Windows 7, it is good. Like Dimrill, everything just installed really smoothly. I plug in my D40x to upload some pictures and, hullo! What's this? A message saying, "Ooh, look a camera, a D40x, here's some drivers for it - zing!" Seconds later that's that fixed. The pin-taskbar's nice too, and I'm liking this Google Chrome I'm trying out as well. Yup, a whole world of liking at the mo'. I'm running the 64bit version and do feel there's a bit of unneccessary slowdown at times, but not much really. It is nice having the full four gigs of ram recognised too.

I had trouble with the printer and touchpad, but the Vista drivers worked for those. Everything else either had a driver on the DVD or Update, for both systems.

I haven't noticed any problems with my DNS-323. Now I'm worried I'm about to.

I'm still going to whinge about it not letting me set the start menu to "classic".

Welcome to the 21st Century...classic was so 1990s...

It works less well. I guess it's an enevitable sign of entropy that things just get worse rather than better.

How does it work less well?

Unnecessarily complicated. Looks ugly. Shit. Utter shit. Most used programs fuck off. Shit.

So just different?

It is less complicated with the search working really well..

No, it's shit.

The new start menu is the best thing ever. I'm sure you can tell it to not store recently used programs too.

I think we might have to disagree.... as I found 'classic' horrible and boring..

So you're saying you had fun using the start menu? You need to get a 360.