I’m digging it so far. I’m running it on a 3 to 4 year old system with a Sempron porcessor, 1 GB of RAM and bult in graphics and it is running very smooth.
One major problem I realized about W7 - Pin Notepad to the taskbar. Click the notepad icon, and notepad loads. Click it again, and it brings that same notepad window to focus. So what do I do if I want a second notepage window open??? ( yeah, I know I can right click and select Notepad to open a second window, but I want a 1 click solution!)
On the plus side, I love how you can rightclick a pinned icon and it will bring up a list of the last 50 files it accessed. Still haven’t figured out what I’m gonna do when I run out of room for more pinned programs in the first row…
Windows Key+D is faster anyways 
So I was able to get a key and download the 32 bit version.
Can someone tell me how I set my computer up to dual boot? I guess I need to make a partition and load W7 there right?
Nevermind. I got it to work. It was pretty easy actually.
Sneaky buggers made it dual function. If you just hover the mouse over it, you get “Desktop Peek” which hides all the open windows and shows you your desktop gadgets. But if you just click on it it works just like the old Show Desktop.
I hope the Quicklaunch gets added back in. It’s very handy having single click access to programs I use all the time.
I haven’t found any major bugs yet but I did discover that 7 won’t play a video that Vista had no problems with. Probably a codec issue but I used the same codec pack for both systems.
I also caused a crash by trying to play Soldier of Fortune: Payback without patching it first. But SoF: Payback is a really badly done game so this one isn’t 7’s fault.
I like the jump lists. For example when I right click on the Explorer icon, it lists a bunch of folders I have recently visited. Much more useful than opening up Explorer and navigating manually to where I want to go.
Well I’ve been messing with it for a few hours now, getting it set up and stuff, and it’s really no different than XP in my opinion. Not sure why I would want to pay $$ to get this OS.
It does have a few minor bells and whistles, but for the most part it’s a lateral move to me.
:dubious:
This is pretty much true of every operating system. Windows XP is, for the most part, exactly like every other Windows operating system. OS X is pretty much exactly like every Mac OS. The only differences are bells and whistles, some stability and speed, and the ability to exploit some new technologies and make some new computing requirements easier or better. But, all in all, they are the same by necessity.
One can assume that Windows 7 will be better with wireless than XP, have better power management features than XP, better media integration than XP and better integration with IE. It’ll do a lot of modern things marginally better than XP. If all you do is work with spreadsheets, browse the web, send emails and play Zune/iTunes it’s probably going to be a lateral move, but so is every OS advance until the end of times so long as what you are using now is still supported.
Windows is the most commonly used OS in the world by a wide margin. It has it’s faults, but I’m not sure why anyone would expect them to reinvent the wheel when it would essentially alienate the vast majority of users.
Umm, QuickLaunch is still there technically. It’s now infused into the toolbar–simply drag whatever programs you want to “QuickLaunch” onto it and it’ll reside there permanently.
It’s very much like OSX’s Dock, if you’re familiar with that.
As this isn’t game-related, I’m going to move it to MPSIMS.
I’ve seen a few programs already say that they require Vista to work; XP won’t do. If Windows 7 is functionally XP with the ability to run those Vista-only programs, it’s got my vote.
Windows + M does the same thing.
Or…does it? Alt+Tabbing in Vista will get you to the desktop as well.
I’ve been running it for a few days and I love it. Came from an XP installation. This OS is quick and very sleek looking. I’m running the 64-bit version and haven’t had any major problems so far. Only a few installers for random programs have had issues, and that just may be a UAC issue.
I’m liking the task bar features. Plus, they got rid of the Vista Sidebar, yet you can still use gadgets, they just pin themselves to the desktop. I’m very much considering installing it on my gf’s laptop for her to test (she’s running Vista Home Premium), if she let’s me.
I have now installed it and have been running it for a few days. Overall a much needed improvement over Vista. I had to do a clean install as I was running XP64, it might be useful if the proper release allowed an upgrade, though Vista only allowed an upgrade from certain versions of XP as well.
I do like the preview of programs though I am not so keen on having the windows from the same program grouped. If you have more than one browser window open for example instead of just clicking it in the taskbar you have to select the window from the preview.
I also dislike the All Programs menu with the scroll bar.
I have had a few issues, not all to do with Microsoft though.
After installation I checked the device manager and found a couple of things that hadn’t been installed properly, which the installation process failed to mention. But the installation took about 40 minutes and went smoothly apart from that.
I have had to try and install things a couple of times but they worked eventually, and I do like the new compatibility wizard they have brought in.
I prefer to have a fixed page size on my system and changing it caused the applet to hang, but that may just be the beta version.
I have had a few issues with drives for my graphics card and sound card as well, they do not seem to have sorted things out properly yet, but whether that is Microsoft or the manufacturers is another question.
The original driver for my nVidia card worked ok, but the new one from Windows update causes Civ 4: Beyond the Sword to corrupt the screen and I have to reboot. As I have a widescreen display games like Doom 3 are not taking up all the screen either, becuase they do not have a 1680x1050 resolution. Previous drivers stretched them to full screen.
As I had to do a clean install, I have had to copy the settings for some of my programs from where it save a copy of my old installation to the new Documents and Settings folder. Only it is not Documents and Settings now, it is Users, which took me a while to find out. I am not entirely in agreement with programs saving things there anyway, but it does seem to be more common.
All in all it does seem an improvement over Vista and it looks to be on its way to becoming an improvement over XP.
How is Windows 7 at wireless networking?