Hard Light Productions Forums
Off-Topic Discussion => General Discussion => Topic started by: Fury on May 06, 2009, 02:35:58 am
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Release Candidate was released to public yesterday (or the day before depending on how convenient your timezone is) and available to everyone here and will be available at least through July 2009;
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windows-7/download.aspx
The RC will expire on June 1, 2010. As always with OS installations, make sure you have backups on external device.
I installed Win7 RC yesterday. Installation was rather quick and smooth, could have been quicker if I had installed Win7 from USB stick. You can do this with xcopy like this; xcopy e:\ f:\ /e /f (where e: is the mounted ISO-image and f: the USB stick)
After installation I proceeded to install all the usual suspects of the software I use. Only Daemon Tools was warned about by Win7 prior to installer starting, stating it was incompatible with Win7. Oh well, not a big deal. Only need to find another tool to mount disc images with. So far all installed apps work, haven't had time to do any gaming yet but I don't see any reason for them not to work if they work in Vista, which I was happily using before.
I have barely scratched the surface of Win7 but I made note of greatly improved memory management compared to Vista. Win7 only used about 768MB RAM on my main PC that has 8GB RAM. My buddy's laptop which only has 1GB RAM reported that about 40% of RAM was free, and this was while he was running other apps too. Microsoft certainly has made sure that Win7 works well on netbooks too as well as older PCs.
I encountered a strange problem with Win7 however. All my stuff is stored on external USB drive. Wherever I started an exe file that had been downloaded from internet, I got the usual "are you sure" dialog that was in Vista too, but for some reason Explorer window often froze as soon as the dialog appeared. But I could still open another explorer window and re-launch the exe file as usual and it worked. The previous Explorer window would unfreeze a bit later. Makes me wonder why it freezes temporarily. I have yet to confirm whether this happens on internal drive too.
That aside I didn't encounter any problems, at least none that I could see. I did go and see the event log however, and I see MS has made improvements in there too. Now among other things, Win7 warns about memory leaks in event logs and there was one memory leak reported. That's actually pretty cool to have.
However, my biggest issue with Vista was not fixed in Win7. The annoying feature which auto-ejects your optical drive tray whenever you click on the drive icon on Explorer and the drive is empty. I hate this feature because my case has a front door blocking the optical tray. Well, I hope this trick still works in Win7 as I haven't tried it yet; http://www.vdhout.nl/20080712/
UAC is less intrusive but I did not have a problem with it in Vista either. I prefer to be warned on actions that could be potentially malicious. I'll get back to this topic once I've actually used Win7 longer. :)
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Let see that Windows 2 then Windows 3 and 3.1. Next came 95 then 98 then ME (2000). That progressed to XP then to Vista (if you call that progress). Now Windows 7. That's somewhere between 3.11 and 95 version wise. Probably about right on usefulness and bugs as well.
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Gee, that was really constructive. :rolleyes:
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Actually what comes to gaming in W7, some people have reported having problems with Punkbuster and W7 on certain games. CoD4 being one of the I think.
Also some fellas had problems with Steam, when some had not. So that's a some sort of a "?" at this point.
I downloaded the RC (both 32 ad 64) yesterday... and began to plan if I should switch to it when my summer vacation begins.
And by switching I mean to completely wipe XP64 off and install W7 64 instead, leaving no other OS to back me up.
It's a bit of a gamble, but the Beta already did have such a positive impact on bot VMWare and on my "project pc" that I'm almost willing to take the risk.
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i installed it yesterday andit doesnt recognise external usb hd (well it knows they are there but says thery need formating) this creates a problem as im running a laptop and was hoping to run win 7 from the external disc drive ut it starts to load ten crashes.... but works perfectally when in the machine ....
other than that its pretty but i hate the security features .....;
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Well, running it from an external USB HD isn't supported at all (It even refuses to install if there are external HDs connected to your rig). As for your other problem, try this:
1. Press [Windows], enter [diskmgmt.msc] and hit [enter] to open the Disk Management interface in Windows 7.
2. Now you can see all the hard drives and partitions of the computer system.
3. See if all partitions have drive letters assigned. If one hasn't, select it.
4. Right Click on that partition and Select “Change Drive Letter and Paths”
5. Now click the Add button and assign a drive letter to the partition.
After this, your missing partition should be visible.
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other than that its pretty but i hate the security features .....;
yeah man i hate having a secure OS too
Turn them off, I guess. Although honestly I'm surprised anyone is bothered by W7's UAC. It's pretty toned down.
Freespace Open doesn't work on RC1 for me. I get an OpenGL error about proper pixel formats or something. Could just be because I'm testing the OS on my laptop which has an Intel chipset.
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I have been using 7 for several weeks now, and FS2 has never given me any problems.
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After installation I proceeded to install all the usual suspects of the software I use. Only Daemon Tools was warned about by Win7 prior to installer starting, stating it was incompatible with Win7. Oh well, not a big deal. Only need to find another tool to mount disc images with.
This intrigued me, in the Beta, Windows didn't complain at all about DT and about halfway into the installation, DT would fail because of a driver that was incompatible with Windows 7 failed to install, now in the RC, Windows complains that it isn't compatible but since DT has since released a version that is compatible with Windows 7 it works despite complaints by Windows.
Anyway it seems to be working just fine. But some things in the Beta were better, specifically the autoconfig. After install in the beta, it immediately detected my graphics card and booted at the maximum resolution. Now in the RC it didn't and booted at a annoying 800x600 (I think). The only reason I can see for that is a change in the graphics card between the Beta and the RC (7600GT to HD4890).
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I have been using 7 for several weeks now, and FS2 has never given me any problems.
What chipset do you have, though?
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Radeon 1250. Yeah, I know, no Intel, thus not being easily comparable to yours, but I believe that any problems you have aren't caused by 7, but rather Intel's driver support.
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This intrigued me, in the Beta, Windows didn't complain at all about DT and about halfway into the installation, DT would fail because of a driver that was incompatible with Windows 7 failed to install, now in the RC, Windows complains that it isn't compatible but since DT has since released a version that is compatible with Windows 7 it works despite complaints by Windows.
The latest DT officially supports Win7?
Anyway it seems to be working just fine. But some things in the Beta were better, specifically the autoconfig. After install in the beta, it immediately detected my graphics card and booted at the maximum resolution. Now in the RC it didn't and booted at a annoying 800x600 (I think). The only reason I can see for that is a change in the graphics card between the Beta and the RC (7600GT to HD4890).
That would be because the ATI drivers bundled with Win7 are not recent enough to support the new 4890. RC detected my 4870 fine and used optimal resolution.
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Radeon 1250. Yeah, I know, no Intel, thus not being easily comparable to yours, but I believe that any problems you have aren't caused by 7, but rather Intel's driver support.
Oh, no doubt. I've been very impressed with W7 since the beta. But if my laptop can't run FSO under 7 then I'll have to roll it back to XP. Which is infuriating, because I really want to leave that OS behind but silly incompatibilities keep holding me back.
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This intrigued me, in the Beta, Windows didn't complain at all about DT and about halfway into the installation, DT would fail because of a driver that was incompatible with Windows 7 failed to install, now in the RC, Windows complains that it isn't compatible but since DT has since released a version that is compatible with Windows 7 it works despite complaints by Windows.
The latest DT officially supports Win7?
Yep :D
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Yep, latest DT does work even though RC does warn it is incompatible.
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Should I bother upgrading from 7077? What bonuses would I get?
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DT actually worked with the beta too, interestingly enough.
They just rolled out updates for the beta so maybe my periodic freezing issues i'm getting with explorer will calm down. The fact that they are destroying their most useful tool is pissing me off
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What tool?
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WINDOWS EXPLORER[/b]
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OK...
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Only thing I'm not fond of in Win 7 is the file explorer.... everytime they release windows it gets dumbed down more and more. UGH
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Really? I love the new explorer. What exactly is dumbed down about it?
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The release candidate can't connect to my printer :C
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Really? I love the new explorer. What exactly is dumbed down about it?
Most of the issues I have are on the right side view. I liked Vista's better, you can hide everything but the directory layout. I don't want to see Favorites, Libraries, Homegroup, Network, Control Panel.. etc. Or at least I haven't found the switch yet.
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Win7 also supports custom login screen backgrounds without hacks.
http://www.withinwindows.com/2009/03/15/windows-7-to-officially-support-logon-ui-background-customization/
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Indeed, it does. Although I have found the registry-hack method described in that post you linked to be unreliable (The system would often reset the reg value in question for no adequately explained reason).
To enable it permanently, create the folder %windir%\system32\oobe\info\backgrounds, and put the background image you would like to see in there, as per the post's instructions (Remember, it has to be a jpg, smaller than 256 kb.). Then open the Start-Menu, type "gpedit.msc" in the search field and press enter. This will open the group policy editor.
Navigate to "Computer Configuration->System->Logon". Double-click on "Always use custom background", and change it from "Not configured" to "Enabled".
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For wallpapers I just use WinWall :)
You can randomize backgrounds and have them change at intervals.
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A function, that, incidentally, was also included in Win7 by default.
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Dug up for fix posting.
If anyone else is having printer troubles with windows 7, the following technique worked perfectly for me:
http://www.pchell.com/support/printeraccessdenied.shtml