The move to Windows 7

Tek7

Tek7

CGA President, Tribe of Judah Founder & President
Staff member
As per my first post from inside Windows 7, I'm now running Microsoft's new OS.

My first thought? "This is what Vista should have been."

My second thought? "Wow, so Vista really did suck. It wasn't just me or my computer."

It's difficult not to evaluate Windows 7 except in comparison to Vista and 7, based on one day's experience, is vastly superior to Vista. Performance is greatly improved, the OS installed drivers for all my hardware out of the box (side note: I'm using a Dell Studio 1737), and, well, performance is greatly improved. I say it twice because poor performance was the main reason I kicked Vista to the curb.

I moved from Vista Ultimate (which came pre-installed on my notebook) to Windows 7 Home Premium and I still prefer 7.

Windows 7 highlights the crapulence of Vista, even down to the insert that comes in the retail package. Microsoft touts there being less clutter (paraphrasing), referencing many end users' and experts' opinions on the worst Microsoft OS since Windows ME.

I haven't felt this confident in Microsoft since I fired up OneNote 2007 for the first time. It's a very strange and, I admit, unsettling feeling. But my system reboots faster than ever before, I can type posts and text appears immediately as I type it instead of several seconds after, YouTube videos don't stutter horribly (or at all) any more, and the drivers thing I mentioned earlier really impressed me.

I'm more or less settled in for daily productivity. I just have one or two last e-mail accounts to set up, then it's on to installing games. I installed the essentials yesterday and, before I entered any account information (excluding the Windows 7 product key to activate the OS and one product key for a purchased application), I made a disc image using Macrium Reflect.

I plan on being online and ready to play Team Fortress 2 tonight. (I created Steam backups of TF2, Left 4 Dead, and Unreal Tournament 3 before I formatted my drive.)
 
Last edited:
I put Windows7 on my netbook and it performs the same as it did when it had XP on it.

I remembere that I had a 2gb stick of ram in a laptop we rarely use, so I [consulted with HCS first about it :D, then I] slapped it in (an upgrade from 1gb)!

The netbook boots faster and shuts down faster than it did with the 1gb stick in it. Windows7 is a fantastic OS and ran fine on 1gb of ram (with no gaming or stressful usage) but the improvement with an extra gig of ram is noticable. Remember that Windows7 is still more complex than XP (which is really old by now).
 
Windows 7 is not as fast as xp..multiple testing labs have proven it...BUT Vista was such a piece of garbage anything else is going to be faster. 7 is really Vista 2.0.
 
From someone who runs Linux 85% of the time, is Windows 7 worth upgrading on my Windows partition from XP?
 
Don't the instructions state that you cannot directly upgrade from XP, but instead you have to do a "custom installation." Thats how I had to install it.
 
I was all ready to rant about my incredibly frustrating discovery (the discovery itself wasn't frustrating, but rather the timing), but I need to cut this short and get back to my re-install.

My wife's computer has a 64-bit processor. I found this out after installing and activating Windows 7 32-bit on her computer and spend about an hour on installing applications.

ARG.

Fortunately, the Family Pack comes with both 32-bit and 64-bit version of Windows 7. I formatted my wife's notebook's hard drive and got to work installing the 64-bit version.

Then I thought to check whether or not the processor in my notebook was 64-bit.

I think you see where this is going.

Yes, the processor in my notebook is 64-bit. I discovered this today (technically, yesterday, Oct. 26) after installing Windows 7 on Saturday (Oct. 24).

AAARG.

That's the short version. Once I get back up and running on my notebook (I'm posting this from my desktop), I'll share about how my notebook wouldn't properly read the 64-bit version DVD and I had to dupe the disc and use the DVD-R to get it to load.
 
just because you have 64 bit cpus does not mean you will take a performance hit on 32 bit..either work just fine. If you ave older programs and less than 4 gigs of ram i would go with 32 bit..you really only need 64 bit if you have 4 or more gigs of ram
 
This thread made me remember that Microsoft extended their support for XP because everyone was having so much trouble with Vista.

Because they've actually introduced a decent product now, will they cease support for XP?
 
yes the hard cutoff is 2013 but i would expect more and more software to NOT be developed for xp by next year. Now is the time to move.
 
w00t, I'm now running Windows 7 64-bit with all drivers installed. I also installed the basics (programs I use on a frequent basis), so now it's time to install my games.

Hescominsoon said:
just because you have 64 bit cpus does not mean you will take a performance hit on 32 bit..either work just fine. If you ave older programs and less than 4 gigs of ram i would go with 32 bit..you really only need 64 bit if you have 4 or more gigs of ram
Click to expand...
I plan on watching for 4GB notebook memory kits on Black Friday and upgrading to 4GB (from 2GB) if I find a good sale.
 
Annath said:
Proven even further by the fact that the Windows Server equivalent to 7 is just Windows server 2008 R2. They didn't bother changing the name on that one for it because Server 2008 was actually well received. :rolleyes:
Click to expand...

The windows 7 kernel is technically just a minor version bump (6 -> 6.1).
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top