Vista and Windows 7 - reactions

[shaithis]

Hardly see any difference between Vista and 7 on my rig and I fully agree with the sentiments that there are a lot of silly people out there that have rubbished Vista without hardly ever looking at it, yet are heralding Windows 7 as the second coming, even though it's a year from release.

[dangel]

The key is to try them both on low powered devices - my tests with the Aspire One showed a dramatic difference.

[Timmy!!!]

Well So far I'm very impressed. It seems a lot snappier than Vista on my ever so aging single core pentium M laptop. The new taskbar is a little odd to get used to, but now I'm in the flow of it I really find it hard to go back to Vista at work.

Thing's that I was dissapointed with:

Xvid/DivX/h.264/ac3 is apparently supported out the box.... so how come 70% of my divx videos didn't work? cccp reluctantly installed and all is fine now, but I did feel that it should have worked.

I love the new 'peep' stuff, but my god Microsoft, please for the love of god kill off Flip 3D. It's crap. Think of something better and more useful, and allow it to be activated by a movement to a corner of the screen.

Windows live essentials seems most definitely not final on Win7 (although Balmer said otherwise at CES). The jump list for messenger is incredibly slow and what's with that second thumbnail when the application is open? Also, I quite like having the icon in the taskbar change for messenger instead of it being in the bottom right, but why only do it for messenger? Surely they should do it for live mail desktop as well. Also perhaps an option for these features is a good idea due to it not being liked by all.

No new gadgets?

The boot screen is nice when it's animated, but then it stays the same and pulses at you randomly... hardly 'wow'.

Does the start menu really need 'most recently used programs' on the left? Perhaps an option to turn that off and have a skinnier start menu would be nice.

The shutdown options are a pretty unimaginative GUI design... the xp one where the screen went black and white with a few options was really nice.


Things I like:

It's incredibly stable for a beta, and fast on my pretty old laptop (once a performance king)
I love the customisation and fading background pics.
Backup seems a LOT more feature complete, and allows scheduled image backups with storage management. Nice.
Peep stuff, new aero effects like peep and show desktop are nice.
Windows media player when playing video is great - not buttons anywhere
Networking far simpler and easier to set up.
No more annoying UAC (well, hardly)
Auto hiding notification icons keeps stuff tidy (although stops people from fixing the problem of stuff running in the first place)
All software I have put on there just works, including games.
FINALLY Windows supports burning ISO files! Only took 20 odd years....

Tim

[Zadock]

The key is to try them both on low powered devices - my tests with the Aspire One showed a dramatic difference.

I have the 64bit version but haven't gotten around to trying it yet, going to get hold of the 32bit version and try it on my Eee.

How is it performing on the Aspire one? which model do you have? i.e. HDD or SSD

I think I'm restricted by the size of the SSDs on my Eee. However, I did find a guide that would bring the installed size down to 2.8Gb or something like that so that would be the way to do. Apparently you can vlite Windows 7.

[dangel]

How is it performing on the Aspire one? which model do you have? i.e. HDD or SSD
.

1gb, 120gb HDD model - and it "feels" quicker than XP on the same system (dual boot).

[Jiff Lemon]

FINALLY Windows supports burning ISO files! Only took 20 odd years....

Cue the start of another "monopoly" law suit!

[MadduckUK]

still too early to tell, im bit by bit putting my apps onto it, looking good so far. got my wacom going no trouble at all which is nice, played some crayon physics which was fun... yeah.. i like the drag to top to fullscreen etc, that feels right

[DDY]

Ink Ball has gone?! I'm outraged! The improved MS paint is nice though

[MadduckUK]

i guess we are going to be seeing a lot of red outlines around images from people with problems in the future

[Splash]

i guess we are going to be seeing a lot of red outlines around images from people with problems in the future

Snipping tool isn't new to W7, it's in Vista too.

[Hicks12]

Anyone else having a sound issue? I was playing left 4 dead on it last night and every 5 mins it kept changing the volume, all sound would go to like 1% when it was set about 90% which really does my head in. Any ideas?

[digit]

Snipping tool isn't new to W7, it's in Vista too.

I didnt know about it till the above picture from Madduck. Actually looks like it might be handy at some point!

[MadduckUK]

Snipping tool isn't new to W7, it's in Vista too.

no-one used that though :/

[Cozwin]

im still on xp never really attracted by vista but windows 7 looks godlike so trying it tommorrow, hopefully ill be impressed.

Drivers could be interesting, ive got a asus p5ne-sli and im using a crap wireless pen. Will be interesting to find out if my homeplug works under W7 though. If im impressed i will move over on release. Still not going to try vista though.

[format]

im still on xp never really attracted by vista but windows 7 looks godlike so trying it tommorrow, hopefully ill be impressed.

Drivers could be interesting, ive got a asus p5ne-sli and im using a crap wireless pen. Will be interesting to find out if my homeplug works under W7 though. If im impressed i will move over on release. Still not going to try vista though.

There's no reason why a homeplug wouldn't work due to the OS surely?

[lodore]

Hello everyone,
ok i imaged vista and installed windows 7 64Bit on my machine.

compatible software and drivers:
realtek RTL8187 wireless card driver (used windows vista driver)
Kaspersky 8 workstation beta for windows 7
marvel yukon ethernet drivers (i dont have the installer only zip file with all the extracted drivers) (used windows vista driver by browsing using device manager)
opera
CCleaner (only used cleaner, according to someone on the CCleaner offical forums the registry cleaner doesnt work yet on win7)
windows live messenger
media monkey
media monkey aac plugin (to play aac files without needing to have quicktime installed) (costs money)
EasyBCD
usbsafelyremove
winrar
quicktime (installed to check it worked then uninstalled to test out the media monkey aac plugin)
firefox
Java
silverlight
Impulse
flash player plugin (works for both opera and firefox)
Karens replicator
Image for windows

programs that dont work:
PDf exchange viewer (crashes when you press the open button before you browse to a pdf file)
Admuncher (it starts the am-install.exe process and the am-install-extracted.exe but gets stuck)
flash player wont install for internet explorer 8.

drivers that dont work yet
Creative X-FI drivers (doesnt support operating system) (will look for win7 beta drivers on creative site later)
intel infinst_autol doesnt install. same problem cannot determine the OS. link to windows 7 beta intel chipset drivers would be useful if avaliable. i use P35 chipset.
programs i havent tested yet:
openoffice
superantispyware pro
skype
will test any remaining programs tomorrow.

so like 3 programs dont work and the rest do. i am very impressed.

windows 7 is definatly lighter and faster than vista.
it closes off services when they are not needed.
so if i add a desktop gadget it starts the gadgets process. but as soon as i delete all the gadgets from desktop the gadget process stops and closes. gotta love trigger services.

vista in use=around 63 processes
windows 7 in use around 44-50