I am just curious on what everyone else things about Windows 7 as of right now.

I.. acquired, a copy of Windows 7, and installed it on my older Toshiba Satellite A105 laptop. This laptop is running 2GB of RAM with a dual core 1.8GHz proc.

Installation took a while, and actually took two tries to complete, the first attempt it errored out with a corrupted file problem. Second try it installed flawlessly.

The first thing I noticed with this is that it seemed to support all aspects of the hardware on the laptop without me having to hunt for drivers, that was great. Trying to do so with XP would have required at least to find the drivers to make the wifi card to work and then let XP find them all.

Anyways, one thing I am very very pleasantly surprised to note on this laptop is that 7 runs much faster than XP did on this machine. So far I have had no trouble running things that I normally use, like Painter Tool SAI and my chat programs. I have noticed that flash glitches a little bit in Chrome, not sure what is up with that.

I haven't, as of yet, needed TI-Connect on here, and since I am running the 32 bit version of Win7 Ultimate, I am guessing it should be ok.

Anyone else liking it? Hating it? Neutral on the OS?

When I installed Seven Beta on my laptop all I needed was sound & bluetooth drivers, since the Beta I installed XP needed drivers for everything.

The thing I loved most about Seven was pinning items to the task bar as well as as dragging windows to the left & right edges of the screen to view them simultaneously. I'm saving up for an Ultimate Upgrade, in 64b.

oh yes, I guess I forgot to mention that I really do like the way they set up the task bar. Very nice upgrade compared to any version of Windows in the past. I think it is one of its better features ^_^

Indeed. I also liked how each application will open behind one icon. Much nicer than the long bars in any former versions. I also liked hovering over the icons and seeing thumbnails for all the windows open behind that icon.

It's stable and it runs Finale. One time it made a desktop icon that appeared to exist, but when I clicked it, it told me the desktop icon didn't exist. I checked and it really didn't exist in the filesystem, but was nevertheless displayed on the desktop. It went away upon reboot.

I was using the RC1 of Windows 7 since June or so, thanks to MSDN Academic Alliance, and quickly upgraded to Windows 7 RTM in October when it was released. I keep meaning to post my RC1 to RTM upgrade guide, since officially upgrading is disallowed. At any rate, I have been very impressed with Windows 7, especially with the hardware support as you mentioned in your OP. I was happy that it properly detected my two graphics cards (one NVidia, one ATI, by the way) and also found my four monitors and projector properly.

While Windows 7 is a great improvement over Vista, trying to run legacy programs that access serial/parallel ports is a PITA; also not enabling unsigned drivers by default and carrying over UAC are very annoying.

Not allowing unsigned drivers does suck, but I see why MS did it. Drivers are easily the number 1 cause of crashes and BSODs, and the consumer is quick to pin the blame on MS.

As for UAC, it is a huge improvement in Windows security model. Its not perfect, but UAC in Win 7 is much improved and far less annoying than in Vista.

As for legacy programs, have you seen/tried Windows 7's XP VM mode?

I was under the impression that the XP compatibility mode was handled by Virtual PC, which followed the Microsoft policy of deliberately not supporting parallel ports at any base address other than 0x378 (and the Connectix version that did uses a network driver that Vista blocks, so you can't install old versions of VPC to get around this limitation).

UAC is still a massive pain to have to say "yes" just to move your a cursor, which is why I have it disabled

Haven't heard of Windows 7 XP VM mode; I've tried running legacy programs under "compatibility mode", but that hasn't been working too well; I'll give the VM mode a shot.

I tried out XP mode in the RC to run an old version of MPLAB with my serial ICD, and it all worked fine.

As for my experiences, it feels that little bit more polished than Vista. It performs fine, so I can't complain.
As with Vista, one of the first things I've done with a new install was disable UAC. It is less intrusive than Vista's, but I still prefer to go mucking about with files installed outside of the cordon without questions every time I attempt to change something.

The new taskbar is my favorite new feature, and programs keep surprising me with neat jumplist/whatever support (such as Zune, which puts playlists on a jumplist).

I've basically decided I want to get Windows 7. Just for the shit of it. I don't want to do dual boot as that's a lot of work and my hard drive already has 2 partitions on it.

Basically, what I want to do is just put Windows 7 in place of XP, which I'm pretty sure I can do.

My hard drive has 2 partitions. One is C:, which is where Windows XP is installed. The other is D:, which has all my important data (including games). So basically I already backed my system up. However, what I want to know is if I can even do this without consequence. If I were to just clear out the C: partition and install Windows 7 on it, would I still be able to access the D: partition without any issues? Or would I have to reformat that partition to so Windows 7 could interact with it? I have reinstalled Windows XP on C: before without having to do anything to D:, but that's probably because I made both partitions when installing XP the first time...


Anyway, any info would be appreciated.

It theoretically works. Just don't touch ANYTHING that says format. If you need to format something, get yourself a gParted CD. When I installed it, it deleted all my partitions, except maybe my FAT32 partition, I don't remember. But no permanent harm was done, and I learned how to recover deleted partitions.

Anyway, since you have no linux partitions, yeah it should work flawlessly.

Partitions are entirely independent of operating systems. What matters is the file system on the partition, but both XP and Windows 7 support the same file systems (FAT and NTFS). So as long as you don't delete or format your D: drive, all your data will still be on it after you install Windows 7. You do, however, want to format your C: drive to do a clean install.

I told Win7 to format my NTFS partition and it deleted all of the ext partitions. I always format with gParted just to be safe.

How many UAC prompts are people seeing in Vista for it to be annoying? I generally only see them once or twice a week, plus any time I run something that uses the parallel port (in which case it's just one extra button click). That said, I have seen some video drivers that take an age to switch to the secure desktop - it's virtually instantaneous here! Vista SP1 fixed the main stupidities (four UAC prompts to create one new folder in a protected directory!) in the UAC implementation.

I find even the occasional UAC prompt to be a pain in the neck. As you said, in my particular drivers for whatever reason it takes forever to switch into the secure desktop (and back, for that matter). In addition, since I generally run into UAC the most in the first few hours of setting up one of my new computers, when I'm busy installing all my programs and applications, that's when I'm most likely to get fed up with the constant notifications, disable it, and never reenable it.

No you didn't. You told vista to format your drive, not the partition. Also, when working with NTFS, gParted isn't a good solution as NTFS support is (or was until very recently) flaky at best.



Quite a lot, actually. I easily get a dozen prompts every day at work. Even MS's development tools and control panel spam UAC prompts.

At home, on the other hand, I only get one or two every couple of days (mainly from Windows Update). In Windows 7 I pretty much never got UAC prompts.

gParted is perfectly good for formating an NTFS partition, even if it isn't so good when you want to keep the data intact. And it was the Win7 installation DVD that did it, and it didn't format the drive, it just deleted the partitions.

Again, no, it didn't. YOU deleted the partitions. YOU screwed up. Windows 7 is perfectly capable of formatting and using a single partition, I've done it - and its pretty straight forward. Hell, it was easy and straightforward in XP and Vista as well.