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Anyone using Windows 7 as their main OS?

blackangst1

blackangst1

Lifer
Ive been reading alot about this build, and from other boards I see alot of people already using Windows 7 as their main OS, with no problems. In fact, Ive read very few negative reviews for it.

Now that the official beta is out, anyone using it? Whats your impression?
 
Originally posted by: stlcardinals
Originally posted by: Genx87
Originally posted by: stlcardinals
Where is the beta officially out at?
Click to expand...

MSDN. I hope Technet gets it soon.
Click to expand...

Are you sure, I don't see it anywhere on MSDN.
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I dont have MSDN but was under the impression it was released last week on MSDN? I must have heard it wrong.
 
Originally posted by: Genx87
Originally posted by: stlcardinals
Originally posted by: Genx87
Originally posted by: stlcardinals
Where is the beta officially out at?
Click to expand...

MSDN. I hope Technet gets it soon.
Click to expand...

Are you sure, I don't see it anywhere on MSDN.
Click to expand...

I dont have MSDN but was under the impression it was released last week on MSDN? I must have heard it wrong.
Click to expand...

I was under that impression as well. Although Im not downloading from there, I know many sources have confirmed official beta as build 7000 which is all over torrents now. So unless Redmond leaked it (which is possible) it should be out. I cant verify though not MSDN subscriber.

edit: I found THIS...google's cache of MSDN as of Dec 28 showing build 7000 available for download, although the link seems to have died now. Very strange indeed.
 
I've been using it for a few days now. I'm absolutely loving it. Apart from a couple of very minor niggles (Media Player not seeing my videos is the worst, so I do mean minor) it's wonderful. Some people don't like the new taskbar at it's default settings but I think it's pretty cool when you get used to it.

The glass interface is pretty similar to Vista but with some minor cosmetic differences. Windows no longer lose their glassy appearance when they are maximised. The new Windows-key shortcuts are very useful, and I suspect I'll use them a lot more when I get this OS onto my desktop with a bigger monitor. Windows-key+Up maximises the window, Windows-key+Down minimises, Windows-key+Left/Right docks the window on the left/right hand side of the screen.

The OS feels much faster and smoother than Vista. I plan on doing some battery life tests on my laptop, because MS have claimed significantly increased battery life.

The improved desktop background functionality is really neat. You can select a whole folder (or individual items in a folder) for your backdrop and a period, and the background will automatically change (yeah, pretty minor but neat).

The libraries functionality is improved and looks really nice. MS look to have made quite an effort to make networking and sharing easier than ever, but I haven't tested it yet.

All in all I'm very impressed so far and will be buying at least one copy of this OS at launch.
 
Thanks for that Godless. It mirrors every other review Ive read.

BTW I clicked your flickr site...can I steal a few of those pics for my desktop? 😀
 
I have been using for two days as my main OS. I was going to reformat my hd anyway so I figured what the hey, I'd reinstall vista if it gave me problems. I haven't ran into any problems. I like it a lot and it does feel a bit snappier. Load all of my drivers from the start.

About the new taskbar...the default W7 taskbar was fine. Then I tried what paul thurrott suggested and it is even better and I can see what a lot of the reviewers are talking about.
 
I tried it out on my laptop - a Dell Inspiron 600m with a 1.2ghz celeron and 1gb RAM, and doesnt support aero. It's very netbookish in specs. Results were not so good. It was pretty slow, even as compared to Vista IMO. And the sound drivers fail to work properly, which is rather odd as earlier Win7 betas worked just fine with the audio in this laptop. Audio problems aside, normally I'd say those specs are pushing it, but they are claiming that Win 7 is going to run well on netbooks. Based on my experience, they better have some sort of special netbook version thats stripped, because performance was just not there as compared to XP or Vista. But it's a beta, of course. 😛

I'm waiting for the x64 before I give it a go on my main desktop, and I'm really excited to use it on my new HTPC when the parts arrive. The updated media center is fantastic IMO, best HTPC software I've used to date. It was so much easier and smoother to use than the vista version.

Aside from performance issues though, I have to say the new libraries feature is probably my favorite of all. I have most of my content on a server, and I have to configure all of my clients to point to this music folder, this docs folder, and then in order to keep things updated, manually save to the server folder, etc. In Win 7, I just add that server music folder to the music library, set it as default, and remove all the others. As far as that PC is concerned, the only place for music is that server share, but thats completely invisible. Makes management so much easier, especially for multiple users - they dont need to find their docs or photos folder on the server, just go to the docs library when theyre logged in. Brilliant.

The real magic happens when programs are preconfigured to use those libraries. I just fired up media center, and it started filling in the music library. No need to point at the server share specifically, it obviously knew where to look. And if you've ever used Vista media center, you'd understand how traumatic an experience it was to just get it to monitor a single folder and only that folder. Its SO much easier to use now with the libraries.

Other niceties with the media center was some actual text in the video library, so you could actually find what youre looking for amidst the thumbnails. The progress bar is now clickable (finally!). And it can play xvid all on its own. The main menu is still a little cluttered and not configurable enough (I *really* dont want the sports tab), but it's *much* better than before.
 
I installed the beta on my laptop; did an upgrade of Vista HP rather than a clean install. The process took quite a while as it migrated apps and settings to the new OS, but once complete, it's running great. I haven't spent a lot of time with it, as my laptop is my secondary pc, but so far, I like it (never had a problem with Vista, so...).

I haven't done a lot of reading up on the new features, so I'm not sure what to check out yet, but I did like the new taskbar with multiple tabs in IE 8. Unfortunately, the behavior doesn't carry over to Firefox tabs (hopefully an upgrade once the official beta hits, or as they get closer to retail availability).

For reference, laptop is a Lenovo IdeaPad Y510 with a 1.8 or 2.0 ghz C2D, 2gb ram, 250gb hdd and an 8600M GS.
 
I've been running it since the first PDC build came out except for a brief stint on my desktop that was causing problems with 6801 and playing games so I went back to XP until 6956 got out.. now I'm running build 7000 on my desktop and on my notebook.

Having used the OS as a primary operating system at home for nearly a month at this point, I find it somewhat difficult to re-adjust to the previous versions of windows in terms of the interface, particularly the new superbar. I've made it a point to keep my desktop free of items and to try and make my taskbar blend with the background as much as possible. The main things I miss when I use XP and Server 2008 at work are the mouse-over previews that in windows 7 bring that window into focus so you can actually read what is in it instead of just relying on the tiny thumbnail to figure out what something is and those fullscreen previews negate the need to have text on the taskbar buttons, imho. I recognize all of my icons, a quick mouseover lets me look at any open window and select it if it is the one I want to see.

The stack effect on the new taskbar tells you how many windows are open of a particular program, file copies have a green progress bar that makes its way across the icon so by looking at my superbar I can see that I have 2 windows of windows explorer open and I'm half done with a file copy. The other thing I miss is aero snap.. I find myself dragging windows to the top of my screen at work and realizing that they aren't maximizing for me is particularly frustrating. I also find myself dragging windows to the left and right side of my screen when I'm trying to do a file copy, again trying to use aero snap to resize the windows to fill up half the screen each.

Wmp 12 is one of my favorite features, but homegroups and libraries are both great. Home Groups is a great feature if you've got multiple machines at home and want to easily share files between them.

The initial install was nothing short of excellent, it picked up ALL of my hardware without having to go search for drivers, I even plugged in my HP bluetooth dongle that I use to pair my PC with my apple wireless keyboard and it found a driver for it and I had my keyboard paired in a matter of a couple minutes. On Vista and XP this process took 30 minutes to an hr or more because it was difficult for me to find a driver that would a) work with my bluetooth dongle b) pair correctly with my keyboard. In Windows 7 (even in the pre-beta 6801) it worked flawlessly without a hitch and I was saved the driver hunt.

I tend to store files across different drives and libraries is a great way to have them all accessible in a central location but still know exactly where they are and be able to add files directly to the directory of your choice without having to drill down through the directory tree structure to the preferred directory.

Gaming has been solid, accessing music, video and photo libraries through wmp 12 on other machines has been a snap.. any other win7 machines on a home network will have their libraries listed in wmp on your machine and you can create playlists of content that resides on different machines. You can even send media and playlists to other machines on your network (i.e. you're having a party but all of your music is stored on your main computer in another room, but you have a little media center pc with a small hard drive hooked up to your stereo in the living room you could send that machine a playlist of music, etc. from your main machine and have the music play on that machine.

It is hard to talk about any one feature in particular as being absolutely amazing, but as a package I am thoroughly impressed. Unless they screw it up between now and release, I think this will be a day one purchase/upgrade for me.
 
I like some features (running on laptop) but dislike others...

Its not as good as people are making it out to be... i think a lot of people that have not used vista will really rave about it though. Other then that its vista with some minor improvements.
 
so my question is does anyone run vmware workstation 6.5 on this??? I was going to reformat my main machine to vista this weekend, but since I probably do this yearly it might not be bad to try Win7... Id really like to give it a go if it wont toast my VM's 🙂
 
Originally posted by: DarkTXKnight
so my question is does anyone run vmware workstation 6.5 on this??? I was going to reformat my main machine to vista this weekend, but since I probably do this yearly it might not be bad to try Win7... Id really like to give it a go if it wont toast my VM's 🙂
Click to expand...


I just put it on my work machine today and everything seems to be going fine with vmware 6.5.1

If you're concerned, just save your Vms on a separate partition from the OS and open em in Vmware and make sure they work ok 🙂

I used libraries to make a virtual machine library that includes all of the directories I have VMs stored in, makes it nice and easy to keep track of things if I need to re-open them in vmware 🙂
 
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