Downloading & Trying Windows 7 Beta Public

[SpencerH]

I have no comment on Vista as an OS, but I can say that I hate when I have to try to do anything with my daughters laptops. It's a constant barrage of pop-ups asking "do I want to do this?". Perhaps if I used Vista myself I'd be used to it by now, or would be more cognisant of 'where stuff is' when I want to change something, but I doubt it.

[Solver]

The claim that people only like 7 due to the Mojave effect seems baseless. One of the biggest complaints about Vista was performance, coupled with the fact that most computers weren't as powerful as MS thought / hoped at Vista's release. So far several reports I've read indicate that 7 performs better than Vista, which, if true, is of major importance.

[Pekka]

I don't see any reason why I would install Windows 7, I'm quite happy with Vista. It does what I want it to do. That's sort of the idea of an OS.

[onodera]

Multitouch on Vista is a hack by Dell/HP. It's native, fluid, and awesome when it's a first-class interface a la Windows 7.

The API in Windows 7 does do inertial scrolling, rotation, gesture recognition, etc. It's actually pretty refined already, my company has been using it for two years as part of the MS Surface API -- it now supports Windows 7 as well now for multitouch.

Nice. I'll wait for the next generation of Elitebeek, then.

[Felch]

I'm installing it now. We'll see how it works.

[snoopy369]

VirtualPC'ing it ... though I didn't have VPC SP1, and that apparently will cause problems, so we'll see how well this goes SP1 ready to be installed once the W7 install finishes, assuming that fixes things.

[SlowwHand]

Jumping on Vista wasn't good enough, now you're all jumping at a Beta.
What a bunch of fish.

[Asher]

The claim that people only like 7 due to the Mojave effect seems baseless. One of the biggest complaints about Vista was performance, coupled with the fact that most computers weren't as powerful as MS thought / hoped at Vista's release. So far several reports I've read indicate that 7 performs better than Vista, which, if true, is of major importance.

Thank you for this. It actually demonstrates my point.

If you actually look at benchmarks, in most cases Vista is faster than XP if you're on a dual-core machine (which most people who run Vista are).

There's a lot of misconceptions with Vista, issues that do not exist in reality, and now Windows 7 "fixes them" and everyone is happy.

[Grandpa Troll]

Thank you for this. It actually demonstrates my point.

If you actually look at benchmarks, in most cases Vista is faster than XP if you're on a dual-core machine (which most people who run Vista are).

There's a lot of misconceptions with Vista, issues that do not exist in reality, and now Windows 7 "fixes them" and everyone is happy.

Asher

When I first read this, being the skeptic I am, thought the very same thing.

While no where technically proficient enough to debate the inner workings of Vosta, am happy with how it works. Some people have a problem with constant ok of applications, doesnt bother me at all.

Thanks again for your valued input as some of us do read and try to understand your expertise.

[SlowwHand]

Don't compliment him! He won't be able to get his head through the door.

[Nostromo]

After having read many reviews of Windows 7, I decided to give it a try.

I'm downloading it directly from Microsoft at 500KB/sec.

In 1-2 hours, the ISO (2.44) would have been downloaded.

I would share my thought about Win7 if everything goes fine.

You were that bored?

[Asher]

Vista's bad rap always bothered me. People are understandably annoyed by all of the UAC prompts and it taints their impression of everything else -- just disable UAC if it bothers you...

The innards of Vista were a huge overhaul compared to XP, in a good way. But this isn't something most people know about directly, but indirectly. For instance, Eve Online performs significantly better in Vista than XP due to the much better memory allocator in Vista:

http://myeve.eve-online.com/devblog.asp?a=blog&bid=613

When VTuning the client we noticed that under certain conditions the code was spending an abnormal amount of time in RtlReAllocateHeap (see Kernel32.HeapReAlloc, which is forwarded to NTDLL.RtlReAllocateHeap). This did not happen immediately, but rather after a while under specific load, and only on Windows XP. On Windows Vista we got completely different behavior with consistent memory allocation every time.

What this means in the real world is that after a certain amount of time loading resources, the memory started to become fragmented, which lead to degraded performance when copying resources in memory. We do a lot of copying resources in memory, from putting a new ship on the screen to loading up a menu, so after a while that process became slower and slower. This resulted in across-the-board performance drops after playing for a while with a specific playing style. This did not affect all players on Windows XP and not all hardware seemed to be affected equally which is why it was pretty hard to find. Also, this did not happen on Windows Vista.

After some investigation we found that the regular process heap on Windows XP was not optimal for our resource loading needs. We needed to replace it with a specialized Low Fragmentation Heap. This change made the time spent in loading resources much more consistent. Also, the resource object heap is now separate from the other process heaps which allows the memory manager to better manage the blocks for its needs.

The performance on Windows Vista in this regard is still considerably better than on Windows XP but the performance on Windows XP should now be better and much more uniform than before.

There's tons of little things like this, including better OS-level support for multiple cores over XP (which for the most part ran the whole OS on 1 core only).

Windows 7 takes these improvements further, so it'll be faster than Vista...but Vista is still faster than XP, so the claim that it is slower is an example of the Mojave effect.

[CrONoS]

You were that bored?

Yes, I was that bored.

[CrONoS]

Compared to Vista Pre-SP1; I really likes Windows 7, it's very fast (my perception leads me to believe that's it's even faster/more responsivene than WinXP SP3).

Alcohol 52% and the Resident Shield from AVG doesn't work well with Windows 7. It's the Resident Shield that affect my performance. So I just turned off the Resident shield.

Also, sometimes, Win7 make a sound, but I don't know what it means, nothing is appearing to me, there is no msg.

Somes games perform really much better than on WinXP, ( I suspect it's mainly the Win7 pre release drivers for my grx card that are better). I didn't have tried Civilization, my disc seems to be broken.

I love the interface, and the new taskbar. I will see this afternoon if it's efficient from a working point of view (I need to finish a websites; so I will need to travell/tab across several software and windows).

[onodera]

I've never had any speed issues with Vista. Yes, I have a dual-core machine with 2 gigs of RAM. I've been running Vista since summer 2007, and haven't had to reinstall it since.