Windows 7 RC Update to Shoot Blanks Soon

[Guest]

Windows 7 has a decent interface and does not seem as "needy" as Vista in terms of resources. I have two complaints that revolve around the firewall and older games. The firewall does not fully turn off and I can not receive files from friends or even when performing a loop test in an IRC client. And some older games (DAOC in this case) will crash to desktop with custom UIs installed.

 

[kingnoobe]

I found win 7 to be excellent. I would even go so far as to better then XP. It turns just as smooth and has a tad more features. I'm still able to play all my games that I used which isn't much. My system is far from good its only an amd 64bit anthlon 3200, 2gb ram, 3850 ati. Of course I only opted to do 32bit, as my mobo will only work with 2gb of ram anyways. And I feel my cpu dieing. So this is gonna be another OS I buy instead of missing around with a cracked one.

 

[jp182]

[citation][nom]HolyCrusader[/nom]I've had surprisingly few problems with Win7 so far (64-bit version). Most of my core drivers are all beta drivers, but all have been working just fine. Fallout3 has been giving me freezing problems, but I was getting that with Vista64 as well. EVE Online and Guildwars have worked without problems as well - I plan to try UT3 and Left 4 Dead soon.The one problem I've had is I've been unable to use the XP Compatability mode - but from what I can tell this is not a fault of Windows 7. XP Compatibility mode needs a processor and board that's compliant with Hyper-V. My processor supports it (Phenom 9950), and my board *should* support it (Gigabyte board, model not handy atm), but the utility I've used to check for compatibility seems to indicate the motherboard is the problem. I'm sending e-mails to Gigabyte to see if we can resolve the problem - according to them it should work also. *shrugs*[/citation]

you probably have to turn Virtualization on in your BIOS settings. I upgraded to a Triple Core this weekend and saw the option and I remembered that was what was needed to get XP compatibility mode working.

 

[Guest]

Mostly positive experience thus far using 32-bit version. Snappy performance, very stable. Just a few gripes:

1.) Occasionally win7 takes 40+ seconds to shutdown. I know you what you're thinking-- an update is being installed. But I had auto updates disabled, however, so unless MS is sneaking them in anyway, I doubt that's the cause.

2.) Still no out-of-the-box driver support for my ATI mobility X1400. I saw someone above mention an ATI driver issue, too. Is win7 playing favorites with nvidia drivers?

3.) Some app problems, mostly notably the gimp 2.6.6. It installs fine, but then go unresponsive during initialization and has to be closed.

Finally, to the person having trouble re-enabling grub to the MBR for their ubuntu dual-boot:

1.) Pop in your ubuntu live cd and boot from it.
2.) Open terminal

$ sudo grub
grub> find /boot/grub/stage1
grub> root (hdX, Y) (where X and Y are the numbers returned from the find command)
grub> setup (hdX) (where X is the number returned from the find command)
grub> quit

Now just reboot your machine, take out the live CD, and your grub will dual-boot with win7 and ubuntu just fine.

 

[kingwaldo]

System specs: Gigabyte GA-MA790GP-DS4H
http://www.giga-byte.com.au/Products/Motherboard/Products_Overview.aspx?ProductID=2887
AMD 9950 black Edition, 6GB of DDR2 1066 Kingston HyperX, with an Gigabyte 4870 1GB, HDD 500GB 7200RPM, 1000Watt Thermaltake PSU. i don't use on board GPU but doesn't cause any performance issues and would be ideal if 4870 1GB dies for a temp solution, also Logitech 5500 5.1 sound system and Logitech G15 Keyboard

Ive installed the win7 7100 RC from MS,fresh install, it installed very well.
IE8 is in serious need of repair as it freezes and wont even load to most pages. windows explorer also has similar issues. upon some installation of software the setup also actually freezes and i have to alt, control, delete and turn it off with Taskbar manager. I usually use Firefox, but use IE to get new version of products when i format and reload windows. There is a USB issues which stopped me from using my External HDD and this drive work perfectly with WinXP 32bit or 64bit or WinVista 32bit. upon starting to play movies or video the screen distorts/ flashes etc for a few seconds then plays OK.

 

[kingwaldo]

My version of win7 7100 RC is 64bit. windows rating max 7.2, 5.9 as of HDD

 

[acecombat]

[citation][nom]norbs[/nom]Anyone try RC as a media center yet? I'm looking to replacing vista on my media center but i don't want to get stuck without a tv.[/citation]
Yeah it works great and looks better too, but don't try and run it on ageing hardware....it can be pretty resource intensive for the visuals for playing music on low spec systems (I fired it up on my old AMD 1.8ghz laptop). Other then that it looks good and everything else loads fast!

 

[Tiberiusfury]

It's been pretty good, so far. I have it on both my gaming desktop and laptop - and have been happy enough to upgrade from XP.

I was interested in the virtual XP 'compatibility mode' thing for old games, but couldn't get the virtual machine they had me download to work. VMWare works great though.

Also, the 100mb partition Windows makes now is kind of a pain. Obviously it's hidden in Windows, but other operating systems (Linux, XP) keep trying to write to it.

I managed to get my $450 laptop running with 720p h264 video though! Go DXVA! Other than the subbing problem in MPC-HC, I haven't had any other problems with media.

 

[buzznut]

I am having problems-
I decided to use the easy transfer feature, as I don't have a lot of patience for the tedious backups when installing a new os. It said it would transfer all my settings including mail and browser stuff, but it did neither. I've got to put all my contacts back in and bookmarks and so forth, I am not impressed with this feature. It pretty much didn't do what I needed it to do.
Also, I was running the beta which for some reason had trouble with IE8, and also had issues with media player which I thought was funny considering those are both microsoft products. After the RC install,initially firing up IE, it worked fine. After installing my programs and doing the easy transfer, it suddenly became unusable again. No matter what I do I get the message that "IE is not able to display the page." I use firefox mostly, however the web site for my college prefers IE so I am kinda stuck. Its also finals week so I haven't had time to look at it and see if its fixable, but right now Internet explorer is broken. I am using the 64bit version, and it is harder to deal with than the 32 bit.

Also my win 7 lappy is having problems with the power saving features. It worked fine before but now it will go into power save and turn off the monitor. When I go to wake it up, the system freezes and I can't ctrl-alt-del or anything. It takes a hard reboot at that point. Pretty much makes sleep mode obsolete. One more thing, it wouldn't take the Win 7 64bit drivers for Geforce, but I guess thats because the graphics are handled by integrated 8200M.
My wife is having issues too, although not as many as with the beta. It may be fixable by loading some software for the kvm switch. She is running 32 bit and I find it much more to my liking. Her machine is doing pretty well.

 

[keither5150]

[citation][nom]norbs[/nom]Anyone try RC as a media center yet? I'm looking to replacing vista on my media center but i don't want to get stuck without a tv.[/citation]

@ norbs,

Works fine so far. The media sharing works great as well. I also like how it has a separate library for Movies.

I share with my gaming machine with no problems other than the odd copyrighted movie will only play on my HTPC and not the gaming machine.

I will hook up the gaming machine to record once Hauppauge's hd pvr has some drivers for Win 7.

Sleep still sucks. I will most likely disable it soon.

The downside of upgrading is that copyrighted movies will be seen as created on a different machine. Thus they will not work. I lost about 80 movies. They are still there if I boot in Vista, but I don't think that I will bother with that.

 

[reininop]

I must be the only one with issues. I couldn't install it initially because the motherboard southbridge SATA controller wasn't liking 7. Luckily there were additional third party SATA ports on the board that it did like. Then it crashed every 5 minutes anytime I used a torrent client. Turns out the ralink wirless chipset I was using wasn't compatible with systems having more than 3 gigs of ram installed. This is with the 64 bit drivers installed as well. Adobe Reader isn't functioning inside Firefox for me anymore. When trying to share files with my vista notebook, I first have to add the folder to homegroups before it will share anywhere else, otherwise, it just tells me the folder is not shareable. I could go on. It took me 4 days from a clean install to get it running and stable, albeit still without 4 gigs of RAM inside. Since that point though, perfectly stable. Will be replacing the wireless card soon.

 

[icem4n]

I've had such a good experience that I've wiped all the machines where I am the primary user and installed the W7 RC. I'm really loving it; I preferred Vista to XP on my high end machines, but I think a lot more people will agree that Microsoft got it right with W7.

 

[derek2006]

I love it but my one problem with it is getting Punkbuster to work with it. I hate punkbuster with a passion, it has single handily took 90% of my computer fixing time to get a game to work than any other problems that could cause a game not to run properly .

 

[gomobo75]

First try was my main PC (work & play). Installed Win 7 x64 dual boot with Vista x64 wihtout a hiccup, after 24hs I did a second install on my main hdd (replaced Vista as main OS, fyi I switched to AHCI from SATA IDE in the process), again no problems. I then set the unused SATA ports as not installed in BIOS, disabled boot from CD, saved chnages, rebooted and bam!the system can't find OS. Undoing the changes proved useless and booting from CD and running boot repairs failed too. I reinstalled once more and, so far so good.

Win 7 detected my networked Brother printer when using the add printer wizard, I consider that amazing. It included the driver too.

Also runing dual boot, with XP this time, on my ASUS eeePC 1000HD.
Scores: 1.7(Cel 900Hz/400Mhz FSB, 4.0(2GB Gskill CL4,SC), 1.9(no aero), 1.0(lol, Intel 64MB) & 5.3(5400rpm 120GB HDD) respectively.

Kudos to M$ for the nice work. I still expect improvements.

 

[erichlund]

[citation][nom]joscasle[/nom]Works great!! Only I have a problem when windows go to sleep mode, need to restart the system.[/citation]

I've had that problem on a Vista machine since I updated an nVidia driver. It may not be the OS.

[citation][nom]petergibbons[/nom]Mostly positive experience thus far using 32-bit version. Snappy performance, very stable. Just a few gripes:1.) Occasionally win7 takes 40+ seconds to shutdown. I know you what you're thinking-- an update is being installed. But I had auto updates disabled, however, so unless MS is sneaking them in anyway, I doubt that's the cause.2.) Still no out-of-the-box driver support for my ATI mobility X1400. I saw someone above mention an ATI driver issue, too. Is win7 playing favorites with nvidia drivers?3.) Some app problems, mostly notably the gimp 2.6.6. It installs fine, but then go unresponsive during initialization and has to be closed.Finally, to the person having trouble re-enabling grub to the MBR for their ubuntu dual-boot:1.) Pop in your ubuntu live cd and boot from it.2.) Open terminal$ sudo grubgrub> find /boot/grub/stage1grub> root (hdX, Y) (where X and Y are the numbers returned from the find command)grub> setup (hdX) (where X is the number returned from the find command)grub> quitNow just reboot your machine, take out the live CD, and your grub will dual-boot with win7 and ubuntu just fine.[/citation]

You would think that would work. There are a number of citations on the net that have not had success with it, me included. I'm sortof still trying to figure out why. Don't really need it now, so I'm not trying real hard. 😉

 

[RobertPaulson]

Runs great, with no problem detecting dual monitors upon install. Been extremely stable when trying to load it up.

 

[RobertPaulson]

[citation][nom]Kingwaldo[/nom]My version of win7 7100 RC is 64bit. windows rating max 7.2, 5.9 as of HDD[/citation]

Same... 300Gig Velociraptor is a 5.9 yet everything else is +7?

 

[wheelchairx]

Is there a venue wherein a feature may be requested of the Windows 7 team? The feature request entails an operating-system-inherent capability to assign the left and right mouse button keys to keys on the keyboard. This feature is especially helpful to handicapped individuals who do not have the dexterity needed to press the mouse keys in the normal fashion. Presently, programs like AutoHotKey are required to achieve the needed functionality with Window XP.

 

[derek2006]

I think to score higher you may need SSD

 

[RobertPaulson]

[citation][nom]derek2006[/nom]I think to score higher you may need SSD[/citation]


Anyone with a 7200RPM drive scoring less than 5.9?

 

[loneninja]

I've actually had more problems with Win7 RC than I did with Vista several months after Vista was released. Win7 refused to run the installer on the disk that came with my motherboard, so lucky for me it picked up almost all drivers automatically. A number of programs that work with Aero in Vista forces Win7 to revert out of Aero and to a basic theme. Than I've also go DirectX errors like no other, major problems getting DirectX 9 games working, get an error telling me DirectX 9 isn't installed, even after I manually install it.

 

[neiroatopelcc]

[citation][nom]Article[/nom]So for those of you now running Windows 7 RC, has it been a smooth experience?[/citation]

Except for the Windows Event Logging service failing to start on a single boot it's been performing wonderfully. The compatibility system with windows XP doesn't quite work perfectly, but ironically compatibility with windows 98/me makes most stuff work. Albeit with a limit to the number of voices available at least using my alc889 driver.

 

[Cache]

I'm really enjoying the Win7 RC--no real issues to speak of, aside from a couple of FireFox stability problems (and this I suspect is due to a couple of add-ons). Games run very well, and the interface itself is very intuitive. LOVING the libraries feature.

 

[HolyCrusader]

Response//update from earlier:

As before, the few problems I'm having with Win7 are not Windows-Related. Fallout 3 I think I've narrowed-down to Creative ALchemy - more testing will confirm that - but it's a problem that existed in Vista as well as Win7.

XP Compatability mode: I've switched and unswitched the BIOS Virtualization setting so many times if it were a physical switch it'd be worn-out. As far as the AMD-V Testing tool is concerned, my board needs a BIOS update. Gigabyte's tech support so far has not been very useful. I'm still holding out hope I can somehow get the problem resolved, but I suspect I'm going to be forced to swap motherboards soon 🙁 I'll be starting a forum thread on this soon.

 

[Toddosan]

i have been using WIN7 for about and week now and no complaints, the ATI issue for the 1xxx series of cards is with ATI, its seems that they ditched support for older cards in WIN7, the only supported cards are the 2000 series and above 🙁 , but the ATI driver that came with is seems good, just no Catalyst control center. I have to say im impressed with MS this time around and cant wait for retail of WIN7.