Windows 7, would you switch?

[chikorita157]

I have finished downloading a copy of Windows 7 RC1 64-bit edition and plan to do a upgrade install after backing up when I come back to my home.

I'm testing this in my Unibody Macbook Pro since all my data are on my Mac OS X Partition already backed up with Time Machine... I'm just going to image my Windows Vista Business X64 Partition with a imaging program called Winclone (very useful program to back up boot camp partitions) so I can revert to my backup after I finish testing Windows 7 RC1 (and also it's pointless to keep it installed because it's starts annoying you with shutdown notices on March 1, 2010) . I'm planning to run some benchmarks (3DMark06, etc) and then compare it to the benchmarks taken on Vista. I'm not planning to use it that much since I only use it for gaming and only interested on how games will perform in 7.

Also another note for Mac users using Macdrive on Windows: You need to disable Macdrive before installing Windows 7 RC, or it will copy the files to the Mac OS X Partition which will cause the setup to fail.

Also, upgrading from previous versions of Windows 7 to RC1 is not recommended... it will cause your system to crash... however upgrading from Vista is safe.

[escimo]

I got brave and installed 64bit version on my primary computer. (I do have a laptop if all goes to hell)
First impressions: Whoa this is quick. I hadn't much to complain about my Vista (64bit) installation in terms of speed. It was OK in fact in par with my previous 32bit XP but this in another league. Seems fairly light on resources as well. I also quite like the changes in the UI. New task bar is a huge improvement and I'm instantly quite fond of the libraries function as well. Overall have been very very positive first two hours. Now we'll just have to see about the stability. Hardware compatibility posed no problems. Had to install drivers for my Terratec DMX 6Fire USB in vista compatibility mode but other than that everything works just fine.

[jpwong]

Originally Posted by SeijiSensei

Now that sounds really annoying. Mark my words, everyone will forget this until next March when we'll suddently see a spate of annoyed postings on blogs and Slashdot.

Well, honestly, if you've been using the OS free all the way up till then and haven't bothered buying a retail copy, wouldn't that indicate that you didn't feel that it was good enough? A 9 month trial is quite a long time when you think about it. Unless you know, Windows 7 isn't going to be out by March 1 in which case it seems like a bad move.

[chikorita157]

I upgraded from Vista Business X64 to Windows 7 and the setup was rather smooth and took 1 hour to update the system and afterwards, all devices were working without any additional drivers, but it broke the keyboard functions on Boot Camp.
Compatiblity:
Windows 7 RC1 took most of the Vista drivers except the graphics drivers, which I updated to the latest version. All the games and programs work except Macdrive which isn't compatible with Windows 7.

Performance:
To compare the performance, I used two benchmark programs. Geekbench tests the CPU capiblities and 3dmark06 for both CPU and GPU. The results from Windows 7 were rather disappointing compared to Windows Vista Business x64 Service Pack 2 (which fixed most of the performance issues in SP1). Windows 7 RC1 is just as responsive as Windows Vista Service Pack 2 RTM which releases later this May or early June to general public.

Windows 7 RC1's Bootup and Shutdown times are simular to Windows Vista SP2 RTM

These benchmarks are conducted on a Unibody Macbook Pro: Intel Core 2 Duo P8600 at 2.4 GHz overclocked to 2.79 Ghz, Geforce 9600 GT with overclocked settings, 2 GB of DDR3 RAM, 250 GB 5400 RPM HD.

Geekbench:
Benchmark Explaination: Geekbench tests CPU capabilities, memory, and hard drive.



The performance between Windows Vista SP2 X64 and Windows 7 X64 RC1 is very close, with Windows 7 having advantages in memory and stream and Windows Vista in Integer and Floating Point.

3dMark06:
Explaination: This benchmark tests DirectX capabilities with Shader 2.0 and 3.0 models and also CPU for rendering.
Vista: 6373
Windows 7: 5713
Higher scores are better.

I was rather surprised how Windows 7's 3dmark score is lower than Windows Vista. Then again, the prerelease WDDM 1.1 drivers are buggy compared to the drivers on Windows Vista.

To see the full results, follow the links below:
http://www.quicksnapper.com/shiorimi...3dmark06-vista - Vista
http://www.quicksnapper.com/shiorimi...s-7-rc1-3dmark - Windows 7

Conclusion
While Windows 7 will help fix most of the problems with stability, performance, and compatibility... the Release Candidate at this time have fallen short of what I have expected from compared to Windows Vista Service Pack 2. Hopefully in the final build of Windows 7 can provide better performance than Windows Vista and Windows XP.

The upside is that Windows 7 uses 5 GB less than Windows Vista. Memory usage in Windows 7 is around 4-6% less than Vista.

[SeijiSensei]

Originally Posted by jpwong

Well, honestly, if you've been using the OS free all the way up till then and haven't bothered buying a retail copy, wouldn't that indicate that you didn't feel that it was good enough?

Oh, I understand that. I just think that MS chose a particularly obnoxious method for indicating that the trial period is coming to an end. Why not a pop-up box or something similar rather than actually shutting the machine down every two hours? Besides it's a one-year trial. Why not start gentle nagging in March and maybe escalate to timed reboots with a month to go? I just think some people will forget all about this until their machines mysteriously shutdown one night, and Microsoft will be the recipient of a spate of bad press as a result.

Microsoft won't have much trouble selling a lot of copies of Windows 7. OEMs must be ecstatic that they no longer have to push a product with Vista's public reputation (regardless of whether it's warranted or not). Slashdot carried some story recently saying that businesses weren't going to flock to Win7 in the first year any more than they did to Vista. I'm not sure I believe that, but I'll be surprised if we don't see rather substantial upgrades to Win7 by the end of 2011. There are a lot of XP shops out there that have held off on Vista. Eventually they'll move on to Win7.

I don't actually hold out much hope that either Linux or OS X will continue to make inroads on business desktops after Win7 is released. Home desktops will come with Win7 pre-installed, but I don't see that segment of the market growing much in the future. The future battleground of computing involves mobile devices and appliances where Windows has less of a foothold. Some personal devices may run Windows, as do most netbooks currently sold in the US, but they are just the leading-edge of the wave. Soon they'll be displaced by a powerful new generation of cellular/wifi devices that run operating systems like Symbian, OS X, Linux or Android. Windows Mobile and, especially, Windows CE seem far behind in this race. Maybe there's a Win7 for mobile devices in the works, but I've yet to see much enthusiasm among the cellular device manufacturers for the Windows OS.

[Vexx]

Better yet... why doesn't Microsoft just sell you a key that lets you update to the commercial release version rather than have to re-install? Strangely, many other pieces of software do that when they shift from beta to retail.

And yeah, I have a feeling that Win 7 may be the "appliance OS of choice" leaving Linux as the permament niche of an "OS for people who tinker", servers, and engineering/science/industrial applications. Realtime systems like Lynx RTOS and such are all "*nix" so its unlikely to go away... but the percentages may just stabilize.

[jpwong]

Originally Posted by Vexx

Better yet... why doesn't Microsoft just sell you a key that lets you update to the commercial release version rather than have to re-install? Strangely, many other pieces of software do that when they shift from beta to retail.

All in all, it's likely due to the fact they might change some of the OS filestructure between now and the actual release. While I'm sure it's possible to write some software that would let you just patch over, there's generally less problems when you simply install from scratch. This could especially be the case if they end up releasing a lot of patches between now and then and would have to deal with OSs that have varying sub-versions.

As for the shutdown thing, while I agree it's obnoxious, but from a programmer standpoint, I have to say that a popup would be largely useless. People are too engrained with clearing a popup without reading the content. I don't know what MS exactly plans for the RC to do when the trial actually expires, but if it's something like you can no longer get into the OS, I can sort of understand why they'd choose the more obnoxious way to remind people that it's time to get their files preped and the full retail version installed. I believe you're supposed to get popup notices starting 2 weeks prior to March 1, but I'm betting we'll see a ton of people be totally surprised thinking they had no warnings on the fact that they didn't bother to read the message.

[aeriolewinters]

@chikorita, if you're using a GeForce, use the new drivers on their site

[chikorita157]

Originally Posted by midnightlumina

@chikorita, if you're using a GeForce, use the new drivers on their site

I actually did upgraded to 185.81 (which are the latest ATM), but it gave worse performance than 185.64 on Vista... It might have to do with the 185.81 drivers on Windows 7 since it uses WWDM 1.1.

If it were to work properly, the 3dmark score will be around Vista's

Anyways I reverted back since I still need Macdrive working and it doesn't work on windows 7 x64.

[AnimeTheme]

Originally Posted by chikorita157

Windows 7 RC1's Bootup and Shutdown times are simular to Windows Vista SP2 RTM

LOL I didn't even know that Vista SP2 RTM was already available... only to some specific testers/developers I suppose?

[chikorita157]

Originally Posted by AnimeTheme

LOL I didn't even know that Vista SP2 RTM was already available... only to some specific testers/developers I suppose?

The RTM released last week to MSDN/Technet and Connect... which the version number is 6.0.6002.18005.

Source

[escimo]

OK. A few more observations now that I've been using 7 for a couple of days. Catalyst 9.4 is not ready to be very kind. Thankfully 8.612 was released and seems to work just fine. My Canon scanner driver gave me a bit of a headache due to stupid installer but found a way around it and now it works just fine as well. 7 seems to hate my JMicron piece of s**t SATA-controller even more than Vista did. Can't really blame the OS for that since that pile of crap doesn't work well in any system.
Gaming performance is a bit behind of Vista, I'd assume it's purely due to unfinished drivers.
Stability-wise seems to be rock solid. Haven't had any problems.
Performance was a biggest surprise. I've seen an increase of 20-30% in hard drive transfer speeds. Which I found quite astonishing. In all hard drive performance seems far superior to Vista. Memory usage for OS is down by about 30%. Full Adobe Master Collection CS3 installation took 40 minutes while it took 1 hour and 45 minutes in Vista and 1½ hours in XP. That really caused my jaw to drop.
USB device handling is a tad smarter than it was in Vista.
Network performance is actually quite a bit better as well. Doesn't get nearly as confused with torrent transfers as Vista did. Seems to be quite a bit smarter in network resource distribution in the whole.
I do have to admit that my Vista installation began to be quite bloated and I never bothered to optimize it a bit so the difference to a properly maintained system would probably be quite a bit smaller.

On the whole I'm sold. As I noted earlier I'm very fond of the new GUI updates. New taskbar is brilliant and the libraries are a great addition. Also a few tweaks have been made a lot easier, for example using a custom location for My Documents etc. default folders. Setting them up was a doddle.

The only problem I've had really was that VSFilter absolutely refused to co-operate with MPC-HC so I switched to WMP12 which is in fact really good and works just fine with VSFilter.

[Vexx]

Hmmm, based on what I'm reading about h/w drivers - I'm starting to lean towards using my copy on my XP 'work box' rather than my game machine. Its about time to clean it up anyway. Anyone have any trouble getting HP devices to work with Win7 RC1? I have an HP 6100 scan/fax/print/cookseggs beast.

Poor Motoko - she's been so well-behaved and here I am thinking of scrambling her neurals.

[KiNA]

O_O!

You gave your computer names? O_O

[Vexx]

o.O All the computers in every network I've ever worked on had names. From NASA to research to science museum to software development...

For a long time the mission control computers at NASA were named after Star Trek characters. The flight simulation company used gods of Hindu... the research company varied but Cthulhu mythos names were popular... on up to the software dev company which used Animaniacs names. A garden nursery company I consulted at used plant names... I remember one law firm that used Simpson character names (the main servers were Burns (primary domain controller) and Smithers (backup domain controller))
Oh, another example are the machines that run megatokyo.com, the author names all of them after Clannad girls.
So yeah... its been a tradition with computers since the mainframe days to name them using some theme or pantheon of characters.

My first home network in the 90s used Lord of the Rings character names ... then Megatokyo names ... now just favorite anime characters.
Currently,
My torrent machine is Taiga, my work machine is Motoko, my game machine is Etona, laptop is Sashiko. My wife's laptop is Hazuki. Let's see, #1 son's machine is Kuromitsu, #2 son's machine is off at college so it may have changed but I think it was Yoko. My #1 son's ex-girlfriend-still-gaming-buddy still calls her computer Ping-chan.

[Farix]

Originally Posted by KiNA

O_O!

You gave your computer names? O_O

All computers have names. It's part of Window's setup. It's just a matter of if they have any meaning or are just random characters.

[Renegade334]

Originally Posted by Farix

All computers have names. It's part of Window's setup. It's just a matter of if they have any meaning or are just random characters.

Except that there is a difference between a computer name and a 'pet name' / 'nickname'. Although nothing precludes the owner from using the said 'pet name' as the computer's name.

[SeijiSensei]

It's not just a Windows thing; Unix computers have had "hostnames" for decades. On well-managed TCP/IP networks there should be a DNS server which contains all the mappings between hostnames and IP addresses.

Windows adopted the concept of hostnames when it introduced file-sharing. In smaller offices and homes it's not unlikely that the computers all share their drives and printers, so you need a way to reference the machines. It's a lot easier to type \\harima than be required to know harima has address 192.168.1.234 and use \\192.168.1.234 instead. Just like it's easier to type forums.animesuki.com instead of 208.100.30.250.

Most every machine you visit on the Internet has a hostname. Unix distinguishes between the "fully-qualified domain name" of a host like "www.animesuki.com" and its "hostname" which is just "www". Nowadays, of course, servers often distribute web pages for dozens or even hundreds of customers with different domains. In that case that machine has a unique name with lots of aliases.

[KiNA]

Its the fact that he named it as a character that surprised me.. Mine stuck as Battle Fortress as far as I can remember

[Vexx]

People have been anthropomorphizing computers since they were created... when I started messing with computers in the late 1970s all the ones I encountered were already being named. When TCP/IP networks started out, it just seemed natural to people to use those names in the HOSTS file (and later in the DNS systems and later in the Windows networks) -- after all, a great many scientists and computer types were sci-fi readers anyway

It wasn't until the late 90s I started encountering young yuppies with IT certs who thought it was "unprofessional" to name a computer something colorful.
One wanted to name them based on location (i.e. Bldg4-Sec5-Sta1138)... I reveled in pointing out that computers got moved around a lot in that company. I also pointed out the human problem that naming one "2001-1113" (year, ID) was fine for database tracking but provided poor associative mnemonic for human recall (e.g. "Oh, you say "Robbie" is borked? Robot-named servers are over in the AI department"). I conceded to her on the idea of an ID like ACCT-105 (dept-ID) but was leaving the company anyway to her colorless scheme

But yeah, I think I'm going to use my workbox Motoko for RC1 testing -- its the one I use most for daily tasks but she doesn't have critical files that aren't backed up elsewhere and there aren't any games on her (games tend to be the nastiest to restore with their combination of huge messy folders and cancerous registry entries... and yes, I still think the registry was a lame idea that simply made backup and restoration more painful). Its also a good chance to purge a lot of crap I don't use.