The Windows 7 Thread

[DarkAudit]

Because the search function won't let me search for "7".

I downloaded the RC and installed last night. So far so good with the install. Updated fine afterward. The only issues I've come across at this point were a momentary delay in getting the Logitech software for my mouse & keyboard installed. A second attempt running Vista compatability mode fixed that.

WMP12 and Explorer *STILL* don't recognize ID3v2.4 tags for my mp3s. Even though most of my music also has ID3v1 tags as well, it's hit and miss to get those recognized. I can retag quickly enough with Musicbrainz Picard, but why?

I was used to the Quick Launch buttons in XP and Vista. It's going to take some getting used to to have to pin items to the taskbar myself. It's also a little bit disorienting to not have the text there for running items.

There is no email app installed by default. To get Microsoft's, you need to install the Live suite. And even then, it doesn't put any icons on the desktop or taskbar. You have to hunt through All Programs to find it. you can pin it once you find it, but still.

The sidebar is history. Now you can put the gadgets wherever. I still stack them over on the right side of the desktop for easy access when I'm running the browser or whatnot.

UAC is still with us. I haven't played around with it much, but the default action when starting CoX is the same as in Vista. Is there a way around this that doesn't involve disabling UAC?

Look and feel is mostly Vista, with some not-Vista tweaks. There's some getting used to. One nice thing is transferring files from my external drive no longer takes forever like it did in Vista.

tl;dr: I don't hate it yet. It does most of the same stuff I did before without many, if any, extra hoops.

Who else is giving the RC a go?

 

[Shakey]

I was used to the Quick Launch buttons in XP and Vista. It's going to take some getting used to to have to pin items to the taskbar myself. It's also a little bit disorienting to not have the text there for running items.

I got used to this really quick. Once you really start to use it, it becomes natural. I really like hovering over the icon and seeing an active preview. Sometimes I just want to check the status of something and that will let me do it without switching windows.

There is no email app installed by default. To get Microsoft's, you need to install the Live suite. And even then, it doesn't put any icons on the desktop or taskbar. You have to hunt through All Programs to find it. you can pin it once you find it, but still.

I don't even look at the program list any more. My suggestion is to use the search feature when you first click on the start menu. The cursor defaults there, so you can just start typing.

 

[Covar]

I installed the RC a few days ago. I like it. Its also capable of running on a machine with 512mb of ram, unlike vista.

 

[Mr_Chaz]

I was used to the Quick Launch buttons in XP and Vista. It's going to take some getting used to to have to pin items to the taskbar myself. It's also a little bit disorienting to not have the text there for running items.

UAC is still with us. I haven't played around with it much, but the default action when starting CoX is the same as in Vista. Is there a way around this that doesn't involve disabling UAC?

If you rightclick on the taskbar there's a setting called something like Ungroup Taskbar Items that gives you back the text for running programmes I believe. I haven't changed it because I like the grouped icons, but a friend showed me the changes he'd made.

The new UAC has different levels, rather than just on and off. Try lowering the level a step and see if that helps?

 

[DarkAudit]

I was used to the Quick Launch buttons in XP and Vista. It's going to take some getting used to to have to pin items to the taskbar myself. It's also a little bit disorienting to not have the text there for running items.

UAC is still with us. I haven't played around with it much, but the default action when starting CoX is the same as in Vista. Is there a way around this that doesn't involve disabling UAC?

If you rightclick on the taskbar there's a setting called something like Ungroup Taskbar Items that gives you back the text for running programmes I believe. I haven't changed it because I like the grouped icons, but a friend showed me the changes he'd made.

The new UAC has different levels, rather than just on and off. Try lowering the level a step and see if that helps?

To stop the cancel or allow pop up for CoX, I have to turn UAC off. Just lowering a notch didn't do it. :blargh:

 

[Shannow]

There are a couple threads on this already. Been using the RC since it was released public in january, and I love it. i sjut did a reformat and reinstall 2 weeks ago with the latest RC clinent, and so far, no cplaints. it works extremely well, the bootup is fast, and the retooled interface is great.

I absolutely love the new taskbar, and run all my main things off it now from the right side without a thought. i have not had really any compatibility problems with my games and programs, either. LoTRO, WoW, War, Steam, BF heroes...all run great. I put AvP2 on there, sicne my brother and I still get the hankering to play that every so often. I jsut run it in compatibility mode (a la vista) and it boots up fine. Champions beta also worked quite fine.

Overall, i am impressed. its Vista without the resource hogging, and streamlined. I will be buying it when it is released fully. I recommend it if you are using vista or even XP now.

 

[DarkAudit]

I found this when looking at my WMP12 tag issue:

verify that all your mp3s have ONLY ID3v2.3 ISO-8859-1 tags.

So what I'll do is transfer the music over, then run Picard on the files in residence, rather than what's on the external drive. That will keep the main stash properly tagged for other uses.

Windows 7 still has the issues Vista had with VLC. I had to go in and set each file type individually to use VLC as the default instead of WMP. Even though it was supposed to set those defaults during installation. An annoyance, but usually only needing to be done once.

 

[Shannow]

Yeah, i had that same association issue with VLC. I did what you said, and that was set them on use the first time. Though, a few times, I went in and jsut used the new WMP...and liked it. I actually am using the new media center now more than I use VLC, which surprised the hell out of me.

 

[DarkAudit]

I'm playing with Media Center a bit now. I'm impressed that they finally fixed a major sticking point with OTA subchannels in the program guide. Used to list all the subchannels of a particular station as airing exactly the same thing on all of them. Now the guide is correct. And I need a new antenna to be able to get more than just the three subchannels of my local PBS station.

Another nice bit of eyecandy is in the music player in Media Center. While your track is playing, all your album art scrolls by as wallpaper in the background.

 

[elph]

http://www.computerworld.com/action/art ... ws_ts_head

Report: Best Buy memo prices Windows 7 upgrades at $50
Sale prices for Home Premium and Professional -- $50 and $100 -- kick off June 26

According to Best Buy, customers can place orders for Windows 7 on its Web site starting June 26, but copies won't ship until October.

If this holds true, I'll be pleased. I won't mind spending $50x2 for the upgrades since I bought OEM Vista 64 Home Prem for both of my systems.

 

[DarkAudit]

http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9134026&intsrc=news_ts_head

Report: Best Buy memo prices Windows 7 upgrades at $50
Sale prices for Home Premium and Professional -- $50 and $100 -- kick off June 26

According to Best Buy, customers can place orders for Windows 7 on its Web site starting June 26, but copies won't ship until October.

If this holds true, I'll be pleased. I won't mind spending $50x2 for the upgrades since I bought OEM Vista 64 Home Prem for both of my systems.

Oh please this. I'll be so there if this is really how it's going to go down.

 

[Bubble181]

I'm holding out on buying a desktop so that i Can buy one with Win7 installed and skip Vista altogether (though I'm a fan of Vista). I have the RC on my father's PC and everything runs smooth...Except his sound card, for which there aren't any drivers yet.

 

[elph]

I'm holding out on buying a desktop so that i Can buy one with Win7 installed and skip Vista altogether (though I'm a fan of Vista). I have the RC on my father's PC and everything runs smooth...Except his sound card, for which there aren't any drivers yet.

If I remember right, there are talks about some dealers giving you a voucher for free 7 if you buy a computer / laptop with Vista on it within a certain time frame. I can't remember all the details though.

 

[Bubble181]

True, but I haven't seen any of them yet. Besides, I'll probably be buying a fairly cheap laptop soon (expect a thread :-P), and a huge-ass expensive game monster thing later, Christmas or so.

 

[DarkAudit]

Harumph. Unless I haven't figured out yet how to bring them back, apps that use overlays like HeroStats still don't work in 7 after they broke it in Vista. (For those unfamiliar with HeroStats, it's a side app that monitors your performance in CoX. There's an overlay function that puts a mini-version over top of your running game that monitors your XP progress and the times on your buffs/debuffs and cooldowns. Quite useful.)

 

[Mycohl]

Both the beta and the RC gave me a BSOD on boot once I had two utilities installed: MacDrive and DAEMON-Tools.

Either one of them separately it handled fine, but in combination (installed in either order, I tried a couple of times) it was invariably a blue screen. Maybe not a big deal to most people, but I use both of these utilities regularly, both at home and at work.

DAEMON-Tools has an update posted which claims to fix an incompatibility with Win7, so I think that the problem may be MacDrive's incompatibility with whatever they did to DAEMON-Tools to make it compatible? It has something to do with SPTD (SCSI Pass-Through Driver) and MacDrive's HFSJ driver (and Win7's built-in FS support drivers, I guess).

So, until that gets fixed, I'm stuck with Vista. I have to power cycle my wifi card every couple of hours to avoid issues with Vista that have been known for a while but still aren't fixed, so I would really like to upgrade if I could.

 

[Scarlet Varlet]

Hearing it will run on 512mb I might give it a go. They threw out a an Athlon 1.8GHz pc with 256mb, fully working at work. I've been kicking around what to install on it. It has Win2K atm.

 

[Covar]

Hearing it will run on 512mb I might give it a go. They threw out a an Athlon 1.8GHz pc with 256mb, fully working at work. I've been kicking around what to install on it. It has Win2K atm.

mind you it's sluggish, but is runnable, just don't try and do to much multitasking.

 

[figmentPez]

I'm not sure if I'll update my current PC to Win7. It's tempting, especially if an upgrade really will be only $50, but I'm pretty happy with Vista, on the whole.

What I am interested in is Win7 for a netbook or laptop. At some point the future I'm hoping I'll get out of the house more than I do now. I'm wondering if by that time I won't be able to get a netbook with Win7 that has HDMI-out and can handle video pretty well. Nice little portable media player.

 

[Ross]

I'll be getting a new PC when Windows 7 hits the shelves. Can't wait to see how this will turn out.

 

[DarkAudit]

I keep catching hell from others for using WMP12. WMP and Explorer are doing a number on my mp3s as tagged for compatibility with Linux and other non-M$ players. When I go to run the files through Picard after getting them onto the main box, they're all corrupted until I reset the tags to the preferred M$ version, which is ID3v2.3 only (no ID3v1), and ISO-8859-1 text encoding (not UTF).

If they're not tagged "properly", not only will WMP not see them correctly, but neither will Explorer. So I'll get a set tagged to keep WMP and explorer happy, and keep the main set isolated for whenever I switch OSs again. Once the whole collection is retagged, I'll get Winamp back in place.

 

[DarkAudit]

The retagging is nearly complete, and the last few files are not going quietly. Windows 7 will not play nice with the tag standard non-Microsoft players and OSs have long since embraced. I'm left with about 60 or 70 files listed as "unknown" for artist and album. They play fine, but WMP and Explorer won't read the tags, no matter how often I run them through Picard.

I used to be able to tag with ID3v1, and ID3v2.4, and let Windows use the v1 tags. It won't do that now. I hope this isn't a permanent change.

(ETA: per wana10's suggestion on IRC, I tried mp3tag instead of Musicbrainz Picard. I found there were extra tags hidden in the files I was having issues with, specifically the lyrics3v2 tags. Picard did not clear those out. I had to clear all tags and start again. Fortunately, searching as a cluster found the fresh tags right away. The files retagged with mp3tag are working as intended now.)

 

[DarkAudit]

Meh. The post that used to be right here was a victim of whateverthehellitwas.

Anyway, I was fiddling with WMP again, and noticed that a number of mp3 files were coming up as having a file size of 0 bytes. Actually, most of them were. They played fine, but still. That shouldn't be. Googling a bit showed me that more builds have been released since the RC was opened up to the general public. I don't have the professional credentials to get the newer builds legitimately, and no way am I risking going the torrent route. So test over, back to XP.

Win 7 wasn't going to go quietly. The recovery partition could not be accessed by the standard F10 at boot, so I had to use the recovery CD. Then I couldn't get Win 7 off the boot manager menu, or even edit the preferred order. Win 7 was still going to be the default. Finally I tried fixmbr off the XP recovery console. All that did was bork the partition table.

Long story short, I had to go the long way to reinstall XP by using the 3-DVD "install to a totally blank slate" version. Anything that would have been in a windows.old folder is gone. I have backups, but the time that was to be saved has been lost.

 

[Cog]

Has anyone tried any game in xp mode?

 

[Cuyval Dar]

Why bother? You already know that you will take a huge frame rate hit in any game,and I have not experienced a single game [strike:10k1vscz]except Failout 3[/strike:10k1vscz]that has problems with Vista or Win 7.

 

[fade]

I've been running the RC on my PC for a while now. It's nice. There are certainly some features here that will give Mac OS X a run for its money. It seems like Microsoft has finally caught onto the fact that people like usability and aesthetics in their OS. I don't have much to say about the technical side yet. I haven't had much trouble running anything that I would normally run, including memory and processor intensive tasks. All that aside, the look of it is still terrible. Microsoft's visual designers can't seem to get out of the Fisher-Price aisle. The chunky plastic, the wasted whitespace, and that terrible glass. Ugh. If you have to compromise bad design by backing up text with fuzzy clouds, it's not good.

 

[Cog]

Why bother? You already know that you will take a huge frame rate hit in any game,and I have not experienced a single game [strike:39s3ripj]except Failout 3[/strike:39s3ripj]that has problems with Vista or Win 7.

The only pc game I have is Metal Gear 2 and It doesn't work in vista.

 

[DarkAudit]

PEBKAC

At least in my case it does. I decided to google a little more into the issues WMP and Windows 7 had with mp3 tags. Turns out what I thought was the standard tag format really wasn't, and probably won't be any time soon. If after 9 years developers haven't accepted the ID3v2.4 tag as default, they never will.

So to keep WMP from overwriting the tags on my music, I have to go back and replace all my ID3v2.4 tags with ID3v2.3. WMP will simply add a 2.3 tag over top of all the others, but that will prevent the 2.4 tag from being recognized by other software. Fortunately mp3tag will wipe the 2.3 tag and leave the 2.4 tag in place. And that tag still has all the Musicbrainz hash information, making the job a lot quicker than it sounds.

And in actual Windows 7 news, the main rumor sites are convinced that we're in the home stretch now, and that the RTM version could appear as early as this week. Or within the next two weeks at most. What does the hive-mind plan to do when it pops up? Gonna try to get it early?

 

[Shannow]

I will definitely be getting it. First OS I will have actually purchased that was not preinstalled on sometihng in a long long while. Since using it in January, it has been extremely stable, runs all my games and processes, and I love the feel and look of it. Gets a thumbs up from me.

 

[Shakey]

There isn't really any reason I can think of to not upgrade to 7, or even to pass it up when buying a new PC. Other than maybe not wanting to spend the money for it. It seems a lot like 98 in that it isn't a huge change like the switch to 2000/XP, or to Vista was. I would suggest holding off buying a computer until the free upgrade vouchers show up, or even wait till the release. It's definitely worth it.

 

[JCM]

I will definitely be getting it. First OS I will have actually purchased that was not preinstalled on sometihng in a long long while. Since using it in January, it has been extremely stable, runs all my games and processes, and I love the feel and look of it. Gets a thumbs up from me.

I pretty much think the same way.

Its amazing, as a Windows OS, specially with the fact that a new windows OS is standard for "will require 10X more power, will be bloated and run slower than your old OS", to have the Windows 7 Beta run at speeds equal to, and in some cases (like games), outperform XP with the computer I tested it in.

 

[Shannow]

Agreed. This is pretty much what Vista should have been. They slimmed it down, redid a lot of the ground work, and actually realized that with a growing netbook/laptop market, they needed a good OS that would not require a ton of power to run (relative to the average users PC)

Basically, it is a well designed and stable OS for the average home user. Others companies have done it as well, but with the large market share, MS needed to do this for their userbase.

 

[rvdleun]

I might be getting a GeForce 3D Vision Kit as well as a monitor that's supposedly compatible with it this week, and those kind folks at NVidia apparantly haven't been able to create any Windows XP drivers for the 3D Vision. Which is why I'm thinking of giving Windows 7 a whirl, because my experience with Vista has been outright B-A-D. Very excited to hear all the good news about it so far.

However, I'd prefer to keep Windows XP on my computer, so have a dual-boot installation. Now I'd like to know, is this easy to do? I've heard that it's a bloody pain in the neck with Vista, and am hoping that it's not a problem for Windows 7. Anyone have any experience with it?

(and if anyone has already posted about it, please link and ridicule. Cheers )

 

[Shakey]

It's easy to dual boot. Do you know how to partition your drive? If so, just create 2 partitions and install XP on one partition first. Then install Win7 on the other partition. When you boot up you will be prompted to choose which to boot into. You don't need to do anything special, Win7 will recognize you have XP and will do everything for you.

 

[rvdleun]

... that's EXACTLY what I had hoped to hear.