The windows 7 experience!!!

hey guys,

just got windows 7 BETA 32x today and i have to say:

IT IS SIMPLY AWSOME!!!!

the new looks, the really snappy and smooth interface, the new features, and the fast as hell startup time... WOW!

i was going to add some pictures but my connection is acting up again and i cant seem to upload anything so il just write some outstanding features:

1- the speed, its just so much faster than vista.... as simple as that, and it uses 630 megs of ram when i actually have 4gigs on this comp, while vista used 1.2 gigs, and as i said, the startup time is amazing!!!

2- the "new" 'cough' interface is a bit "new"(to me hehe), opened programs now show up as squares rather than rectangles, thus giving A LOT more space, and the explorer windows you open stack in one single square, if you are downloading or transferring some file, it shows its progress. when your mouse gets over it, it shows little screens of your opened windows, if you put your mouse over one, all the windows that are actually in your desktop will become transparent and you can see the window you selected itself. VERY COOL. explorers and such didn't change much, but they do appear white-fancy like.

3- windows media player sounds a lot better now, and has a lot more volume, and has a new small look ( small window )

4- you can now select many backgrounds and windows will shuffle them, this has created no lag at all on my computer, so its "safe" to use

5- i will be installing many programs ( games, video editors, steam, photoshop, etc) but the ones i have right now run like a charm ( fraps, firefox 3) *to be updated*

6- hassle-less installation, i made a new partition from vista, booted up the DVD, and 30 minutes later i was sitting in front of windows 7, with only the video driver to install, again WOW!


Overall i like what windows has done in this new OS, making it so that the eye candy is much better than in vista, but does not slow you down at all...

i do dislike however the little "send feedback" thing at top of the windows, but what the hell, after all it IS a BETA.

i can easily say that windows seven beats vista 10 to 1, in every way, and i await for its final release!

 

Ya, what ^^^^^ said

 

Koer,

Thanks for the feedback on what you have experienced thus far.

This is good information.

Having that amount of *speed* per se is a very good thing!

And, a easy installation is always welcome


Cin

 

Yup, I think I'm opting to stick with Windows 7 Beta as my primary OS. Its stabler than the Vista and XP Beta 1's.

 

I agree with everything you've said. If you can't get a program to run, then it usually works if you go into compatibility mode. The only crucial app that isn't working for me is Alcohol (or DTools for that matter), but SlySoft Virtual Clone Disc works.. weird.

You can remove the watermark and 'send feedback' text with a couple registry hacks, google is your friend

 

How long did it take you to get the *send feedback* removed? Fairly easy?


Cin

 

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop
set/create a DWORD value FeedbackToolEnabled and set it to 0.

 

Yep, I'm lovin Windows 7. Running it on my XPS M1330, the only issue I'm having is that the fan is definitely on more often, and louder than it was with Vista. I love the new look, though it's evolutionary it's a big improvement to me and everything's running nice and snappy. It feels "whole" which I never felt about Vista.

 

Just out of interest, what drivers are you all using? I'm on 185.20 and I haven't tried any others yet, maybe someone could post up a comparison..

 

Thanks! That's great information.

So this is a very good thing!~

Too bad I couldnt try it on my Mini 9..

Cin

 

yep, very useful info, thanks for sharing !

 

im having some issues installing steam, i bet it was an error while installing windows 7, because i dont have "permission" to do anything to the file... gonna install again, this time il put in the 64x version

 

Update on my loud and constantly running fan problem with Windows 7 on my XPS M1330...I was using BIOS version A10, I updated it to the latest version A15 and the fan problem totally went away. Now everything's nice and quiet again and I'm loving Windows 7!

 

I must say it rocks!!

However, I dont have touchscreen, so I feel bad

 

Has the power management in windows 7 improved the battery life vs vista?

 

What are the chances do you think, that Windows 7 will have driver support for all the hardware in the new Studio XPS 1640?

I checked the Dell drivers and downloads section for Vista64 drivers..... it's completely empty.

 

i dont know, but i would say it will do the same as in the xps m1530, since the studio xps doesn't really have new technologies... i would think that you wont have a problem

 

In my opinion, it feels like Vista, but a little faster in a way. I like how it installed alot of the drivers by default for my M1530.

 

OMMMGGEEE hanime!
About Steam installation not having permissions, try running it with "Run as Administrator" by right clicking on the install file.

It does feel like Vista, but much much nicer. The graphical improvements are much nicer and everything from browsing the file structure to selecting active window open, all feel so smooth. Aside from efficiency, I'd have to say the biggest improvement has to be the start menu bar. The way they organize the open windows is really nice and makes things so much neater and nicer looking.

 

How's battery life compared to Vista?

I have Windows 7 64-bit on my Desktop and love it, however I'm hesitant to put it on my school laptop as I don't know what battery life is like. Improvement? Or is it lower?

 

some users report is has added 30 minutes of life to their batteries but i haven't tested battery life on my m1530.

hey forte, long time

yes, ive been trying all sorts of things, seems its simply a file problem, or a screwed up installation, il be installing the 64bit version of SeVen shortly, they say steam runs fine on it.

cheers!

 

Howdy Polarix! Yes, I was curious about this myself...I was hoping for some feedback from Koer, on this!


Cin

 

ask and you shall receive

well i have tested this only from looking at the estimate time your battery will last, set to performance with the screen brightness at 100% idling, both said 2h 30mins...

i will test it with my own timer when i have some free time

 

Well thank you! I feel *honored* lol....

This is helpful info ~ thanks! That would be great to get that feedback once you have tested with your own timer! Look forward to it!

Cin

 

Compared to Windows Vista, though?

 

yep vista home premium vs windows 7, both agve the same time reading....

 

Hey hey Koer!!! Great to see you still here and everything looks great!

I just tested battery life for both Vista and 7 too and I can also confirm that they both have the same readings. Couldn't let you be alone in the testing. It's always good to have additional confirmation. Two is better than one.

 

I can't find the windows 7 beta download on Microsoft's website. Is this a special thing given to privileged users?

 

Right here buddy.

 

Can I just ask, Windows 7 is basically on par with Vista with regards to 'problematic' compatibility with older games, right?

Before anyone starts, I'm no Vista hater! It's just that in my specific case, I play some quite obscure old games (mainly console ports) that are a no-go on Vista, so I'm using XP64 right now. I know I can't live in the past forever, I may one day have to dual-boot Windows 7 and XP64, I just wanted to know if Microsoft have made any active effort to improve legacy compatibility, or if this is strictly a progression from Vista.

It all sounds good though! I'm glad that the universal opinion seems to be that this is less of a RAM and resource hog than Vista.

 

I am still trying to figure how to get my HDD rating up. I have a 5.1 with Vista and 3.0 with W7. I am running 32bit Vista Ultimate when I get the above rating!?

 

Great followup information Koer! And, thanks Forte for the additional testing/confirmation!


Cin

 

YES! I think it's stabler then Vista was at RC2 (maybe RTM)

More battery life here... about 40 minutes

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/evalcenter/dd353205.aspx

I believe Windows 7 does it's rating by random reads and writes, that my be why it's lower... (Mine stayed the same...)





I'm Loving windows 7. Much faster with less usage of ram xD.

 

Alternative public link to the Windows 7 Beta:

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windows-7/beta-download.aspx

 

I use x64 Vista and Windows 7. Why not just download the free DOSbox, which will give you, essentially, a VM to play whatever 16-bit DOS games you want to play?

 

Spider Solitaire was a little flukey in Windows 7; the graphics kept corrupting (half-cards appeared out of nowhere). Maybe I'll try it again without the gadgets running; maybe that was it.

I'm not wowed, but it is rather nice, and I am looking forward to Windows 7's release being even faster and more efficient than it and Vista are now.

 

My M1730 only rates a 2.9 on disk access. I think there are no vendor specific drivers for the SATA controllers. I tried installing the Intel drivers for Vista but no go.

 

how do you do this?

 

Type 'regedit' into the little box in the start menu and hit enter. Then you can go and change the value in the registry.

 

i just got the 64x version of windows 7 installed, and now i know better and i left my startup services alone, since the first time i installed windows seven, i messed it up so bad i couldnt even access the internet, nor could i errase any file... i feel free now

i have Steam up and running and im downloading my games, and some video editors.. lets see how it does

 

I had a few annoyances so far that i reported to MS.

First was my vista hard drive did not show up automatically mapped to the computer. I had to manually assign a drive letter to it, where as vista saw the windows 7 drive with no problems.

Additionally, find that to rename a file on your desktop is rather hard to read the text whether it is highlighted or not. I tried it on 2 monitors so it was not them.

Lastly, i had several instances where installing applications would cause the entire task bar to dissapear for about 20 seconds before the UAC popup would come up (yeah yeah i know i could disable it, but its on now for the sake of testing).

The rest i am pretty impressed with though so far. It is fast and responsive for the most part. I dig the new task bar although it can be not as obvious if a program is open or not (i shut down once not realizing i still had an application open). Granted there is a little square around the open programs, i think it is more visual in the old style where you actually see the items open. Maybe they could do something to make that square more obvious.

 

Yeah, certain applications that map drives that work in Vista do not work with Windows 7 probably because of changed method to map them. I noticed this when trying to use protocols like Webdav, but if you manually map drives using Windows 7, it works about the same, though I noticed I have to map it every time as it doesnt seem to truly save the mapping.

 

I am debating weather to install it on my M1730??, dunno cause it is working just fine with Vista including all my games.

 

well jesse, its really your call, i made a partition so i could have my original vista and my windows 7, that way, if something goes wrong, i always have one or the other, but if you are no sure, then stick with vista, when windows seven comes out "to a store near you" heheh, you can give it a go and go full throttle on all its new improvements and features

 

I can't seem to download Windows 7. I'm all signed up, hit the download link...then nothing happens. Is there a trick to this? I've tried about a dozen times with the same results. Also, the new Nvidia laptop drivers absolutely rock. They blow any privately modded drivers out of the water and really seem to boost framerate and quality of video. Anywho, back to windows. How did you guys get your copies?

 

here ya go :

32x : http://download.microsoft.com/download/6/3/3/633118BD-6C3D-45A4-B985-F0FDFFE1B021/EN/7000.0.081212-1400_client_en-us_Ultimate-GB1CULFRE_EN_DVD.iso

64x : http://download.microsoft.com/download/6/3/3/633118BD-6C3D-45A4-B985-F0FDFFE1B021/EN/7000.0.081212-1400_client_en-us_Ultimate-GB1CULXFRE_EN_DVD.ISO

thanks to chris at http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=340579&page=5 for the links

 

I just backed up my Vista Ultimate install so I can go back really easy later and I went ahead and installed Windows 7 and so far all is running fine, I just need to reinstall and try some of my games and see what happens.

 

hey congrats man! i hope you like windows 7 as much as i do, and i will also be testing my games, some say they notice a performance increase in games... i wanna try this

 

Just to let you guys know (I saw that there was battery life talk) I am seeing huge gains in battery life. Over an hour difference from Vista under light usage. It's likely that other machines with similar specs (Montevina and Intel graphics) will see similar gains.

Greg

 

has anyone been able to use gadgets on windows 7???

I am unable to do so. Whenever i press on the gadgets icon nothing happens.