CF-29 Mark 4, XP Pro with SP3 or Windows 7, What say ye??

I have just finished building a CF-29MT. I have XP Pro with SP3 on it. Before I load it up with all of my favorite things I wondered if Windows 7 was a worthwhile upgrade for this machine?? Every other computer in our house is some flavor of Win 7 so it is not new to me. Anybody that has made the leap to Win 7 tell me what you like (or hate) about how this particular machine handles it. Thanks

 

I like it fine and find it faster then XP on my CF29N/ On the other hand, if you have problems it will more then likely be with the Touch Screen Calibration. I would try the CF19 Vista driver for that. however I have no way to test my suggestion. I do not have, or want, a touchscreen.

 

There are those of us that touch.... And those that just look....


... And use the touchpad.... or... uh... er.... eh......

What were we talking about?

 

So basically you install W7 and it will configure everything TB about it? Sounds too easy.......

 

Any particular reason why you're not a fan of touchscreens?

 

Neither am I. Deteriorating eyesight, perhaps, but those smudges and fingerprints are awfully distracting. Just not my cuppa.

 

Feedback from buddies, non-TBs, is that all hardware on trial PC/notebook being constant, W7 is still slower than XP... and I was contemplating W7 on my CF29N as well.

 

Yes, I had it on my CF-M34 and never used it, except to demostrate it to someone and I HATE fingerprints on my screen.

Crazy? Perhaps, but really, why fight it?

On the other hand, I have been told that the TouchScreens are a little problimatic on the MrkV, so there is that too.

 

Interesting, but you are the first person I have heard say that. Now my CF-29 is a 1.6GHz with the extra RAM, but still when I first loaded it I only had 1.250GB of RAM and it was still faster.

As a matter of fact, I am getting ready to load in on my Quad-Core Desktop with 6GB of RAM in just a few minutes. XP is totally lost on such a system!

Honestly, I would load Ubuntu on my CF-29N before I would go back to XP! I honestly think that M$ is deliberately introducing bugs into it to avoid another "Vista" fiasco!

There, call me crazy, sue me, but I said it! :laugh:

 

Allright, Crazy Sue...:laugh:

You mean you believe M$ is introducing new bugs into XP to keep it sucking like they did with Vista? Then why would you EVER turn on Automatic Updates?

Or did you mean you believe they're sabotaging Ubuntu with all that "proprietary code" they keep suing all the major *NIX builds over? OF COURSE they had to have stolen it - look how f@(ked up it is!

Of COURSE Win7 works better... Intel wants it that way, now that they've finally beaten AMD into the dirt.

mnem
giggity-a-byte-ity.

 

I should say that I have no hands-on first-person experience with W7 yet and I'm repeating what was told to me. That said, I still would like to give W7 a whirl on the 29.

Last couple of days, I was helping someone with an Acer lappy and fortunately, someone had ghosted the Vista OS (+ some applications) to 3 CDs.

Funny thing is, after the recovery and installation of a few more small utilities PLUS online windoze updates, Vista bloated to an unimaginable 30gigs!! I don't understand how a 3-disc recovery turned into a gluttzilla! If someone in-the-know can cue me in on the puzzle, I'd most appreciate it.

I'm only glad that Vista has no place in any of my TBs.

Ron in SG

 

Ron

For vista and W7, as they are designed for huge hard drives
Right click on the harddrive and then click on properties and go on disk clean up, when it has finished scanning go on the advanced tab, and then click "clean all but the most recent restores"
Vista makes a restore image every time you install a new program, or have changed important settings...

Report back with results


Alex

 

Alex,
That was a great suggestion even if disk usage didn't reduce as much as I had hoped.

After the disk cleanup (keeping most recent restores), the numbers are;
32,429,027,328bytes = 30.2GB
24,674,250,752bytes = 22.9GB

There are lots of other crap that comes pre-installed with the Acer, some of which I'm uncertain will affect function/stability if permanently removed.

For fellow TB users who have Vista installed, are there tips & tricks they applied to speed up the hog? If appropriate, perhaps they might want to kick off another thread, so this discussion doesn't get too far off track.

Ron in SG

 

I am by no means normally an "early adopter" of M$ Products! I stayed with DOS till W98 and never used Vista on any of my machines.

Never having used Vista is one of the reasons that W7 has been such a "system shock" to me, if you will.

 

Ron a couple of suggestions
You could look in the Acer section of NBR for ideas
And try this program (we Toughbook owners are lucky we don't have all the bloatware that other manufacturers install)
http://www.pcdecrapifier.com/


Alex

 

You will love the Quad-Core with major Ram, I actually have a Win 7 Ultimate desktop with a Quad and 8 gigs of Ram. It never slows down one bit....

I think I may have to try the Windows 7 on my 29 just for fun, I can always restore the XP if it doesn't work out for me.

 

Now I know why they invented those digitizer screens...someone must've thought "hey, touchscreens are cool but I hate when there's fingerprint smudges all over my screen..."

 

If I was choosing to replace Win Xp pro with something else for my Mk4 CF-29, I'd opt for a *nix rather than a blottier version of Windows. Current flavour(s) of Windows are expecting systems to have massively enlarged hardware resources in order to do all the stuff that Microsoft touts effectively, but the 1.6 Ghz CF-29's are going to be far better than the 1.4's or earlier.

One thing I have not yet tried is getting my favourite flavour of Linux, namely Gentoo, going on a toughbook but I've got my CF-28 spare now (the CF-29 has replaced it after I transferred all my user data across) and might try it on that.

I've had limited success with Gentoo on my Opentec 'Openfire' RPC-III system because it's not 'mainstream' enough compared to TB's or other rugged systems to have up to date support (it's an 800 Mhz P3 system like my CF-28).

As much as I delight in using Debian linux on machines set up to be servers, I'm not a great fan of it for desktop since I prefer something like Solaris, but that's not suited to the x86 environment since it's primarily a Sparc and Opteron based OS. Solaris does have Gnome as a GUI though.

Craig.