In what I am about to say I have tried to remember what all of you have said so as to provide my take on the Win7 Vs WinVista Vs Winxp contest.
1. It seems true that the article is basically copied from MS and is only a brief (ish) comment on better gaming for Win7. Take it for what it is. Im sure there's better to come.
2. I ran WinVista when it was first released to MSDN and it was bug ridden, had aggressive services - which I turned off, and had questionable vendor support for drivers. (Admittedly the most problem I had, as with many people, was with sh!tty Nividia drivers - but there were significant other failures that I'm sure others can attest to.)
3. Winvista was definitely too bloated for too many machines on the market. And no, I didn't have some POS from many years earlier, the machine was less than one year old had 2GB fast RAM and had Nvidia's flagship graphics card when it was bought and had two hdds in RAID.
4. SP1 for WinVista saw the OS pretty much fixed up. (This may be a bit general I'd admit). But, by SP1, a lot of driver issues were fixed, and the OS was far more stable. SP2 may well be even better, but I am yet to try it.
5. I have run Win7 since Jan 09 beta and found it to be at least as good as Vista SP1 and by RC faster and more stable in almost every respect. I'd like to reinforce those that said something along the lines that Win7 is WinVista done right. I agree to this - it would seem to me that MS has been very busy to right the wrongs of Vista and to do better than it.
6. The only thing I see as a major concern for Enthusiasts is if there's some very specific hardware that doesn't work due to drivers. Or perhaps for people who are notebook users or similar that are worried about very specific support for things such as biometric scanners. Despite this, I am pretty sure that Windows 7 will run almost all of any WinVista drivers needed for the above to work.
7. I reckon that the Win 7 upgrade from WinVista should be easy and worth it for even better optimization - especially if people do some checking on their hardware and chipsets etc and find no red flags. But, that said, it is by no means foolish to stay with WinVista, especially if you don't really want to spend the money. I don't think the money should let it stop cashed up enthusiasts though who already have the higher end systems.
8. The only real benefit of staying with WinXP is in the case of older hardware (perhaps older than about 3.5 years ish) - hardware that can not be easily be upgraded without requiring a near complete new setup. I am not up with the latest hardware pricings exactly - perhaps hardware is so cheap that what I have said is a moot point? (anyone care to add an opinion?) This said, I think that WinXP on older hardware is still a viable option for sometime, so I'm not saying that it's imperative to upgrade. (But if this is the case, I think it might be time to think hard about getting new hardware to move forward if you can).
9. Just quickly - many older DOS games should run in DOSBox just fine and give you access to atleast 70% of your real old games. (This is really not Win7 specific as I beleive DOSBox will work in all three OS's talked about) [DOSBox is an open source product that supports emulating DOS fairly closely along with technologies like Sound Blaster and others - google it - look in sourceforge]
10. And lastly, most earlier Win98/XP games should be able to accommodated in Win7. (Most WinVista users know this to be the same). But unfortunately not all. In my opinion I don't think this should be a problem for the most part. (and note: for the Diablo 2 fan: it works in WinVista32 with the right settings with the latest patch - so it should definitely work in Win7 [not sure about 64 bit tho which is another story and is the version I think most people will run to get more RAM and to even run 32bit programs with more RAM to spare [I have 8GB atm])
Well thats my "2 cents" - sorry if it bored anyone! Anyone care to comment on my take?
Facebook
Twitter
Instagram