your win7 experiences?

[TdC]

Whelp, I'm yet to see any significant improvement over vista. A few not so amazing cosmetic differences. It's faster, though possibly just from moving from 32bit to 64bit and getting use of my full 4gbs.

Overall, quite the anti-climax.

I'm seconding nath atm. It *does* seem alot snappier than my 64b Vista Ultimate, but that could be the fact that it's a fresh doze install. I'll see how it does in a few months.
pros:
-it detected every bit of hardware correctly and assigned working drivers

cons:
-it said my raid is "slow"

 

[Kryten]

5.9 isn't particularly slow, my raid is the same. Lets not forget, we're not talking real raid - all the work to make said raid work is done by your processor, Windows and Intel drivers.

So far here, I can't really make a direct comparison - I left Vista permanently for a beta of Win7 and haven't been back since. The difference between Vista then (SP1) and 7 Beta was huge. The full thing hasn't slowed down from said beta, I've had no problems with performance - in fact things seem a tad snappier than the RC did.

I'm not disappointed, and for £30 I can't complain. What have I gained? Built in virtualisation which is DAMNED handy as a sandbox, even though I do use VMWare bit time.

Networking - huge improvement over Vista, especially between this and my win7 media centre.
File transfers - especially from USB are definitely quicker than from Vista.

I know full well that SP2 does improve Vista considerably in places, having deployed it more times than I care to count, and it's also worth noting that like some others here, against the grain, I never had a problem with Vista. It worked, I had reasonable hardware and it was reliable and quick. 7 was just noticeably quicker at doing the same things.

Plus as I keep harping on about, finally a taskbar that makes widescreen monitors useable

 

[TdC]

File transfers - especially from USB are definitely quicker than from Vista.

I noticed this just now, when restoring my Tbird profile off of my lacie usb disk: at the same time steam was restoring my games off of it, and the gig and a half of email went straight to my hdd at 28MB/s. Back on vista I would be pleased to get that speed with just one process using the disk o0

 

[Malecheon]

Transfers of large files across the WAN/LAN seem faster to me than on Vista SP2. Other than that, not much difference, but the cosmetic tweaks are definitely a step in the right direction for usability.

 

[Moriath]

networking and sharing files is a lot better in win7 than the slow vista was .. had a problem with audio codecs on a realtek system but fixed that now see my other post

other than that been great

 

[Furr]

The OS should appear snappier as they have spent a lot of time fixing the Windows GDI concurrency problems, basically they focussed on trying to stop the GUI having pauses, micro pauses when programmes do things, may sound small fry but think of the difference an AJAX site makes over a post based site, having the GUI appear more fluid makes a huge difference in user perception.

 

[Raven]

Not a huge difference from vista for me, though I haven't really done a lot with it and probably wont bother, so long as it plays my films, music and games I am happy. I only really got it because I thought it was about time I went legit.

 

[ramathorn]

i was a bit dubious about upgrading, all the lads in work went with it and i was the last one to make the jump. very happy with it, love the task bar, the responsiveness, the easy virtualisation. a huge step forward from vista which should really be binned and forgotten about.

 

[smurkin]

Most of the pluses can be found in this reg article (although its for the RC)

Windows 7 ? It?s like Vista, only less annoying ? The Register

Personally:

Big Plus: lots of codecs including h264 built in
Big Down: no mkv support (and its not easy to add it) - also, I moved to 64 bit and there are no drivers for my fujitsu scanner

 

[soze]

I really like windows 7 my only major gripe is with VPN's when you dial a VPN you appear to lose access to Network Mapped Drives and you need to dosconnect and reconnect to get them back. It's only a bat file i know but still pisses me off.

I found this handy at first and worth a read. 62 Windows 7 tips, tricks and secrets | News | TechRadar UK

 

[Bodhi]

Windows 7 seems like iVista to me - i.e Vista with an Apple-like UI on it. I really do struggle to see the point of it (the new animations etc are fairly underwhelming and the virtualization implementation needs hardware assistance hence sucks) in all honesty, it does very little Vista didn't. It just doesn't have a Vista sticker on it, so people like it.

 

[Kryten]

Not really. Still lots of improvements that still haven't and are unlikely to be fixed in Vista (so MS can sell you 7, naturally) like the network subsystem and many I/O issues as discussed previously.

Honestly though, can't say the visual differences are even nearly important for me other than the better taskbar for reasons I've also already mentioned. Other than that it's neither here nor there visually. It is true people will only act on a name - look at Skoda, and in the same vain those reputations are often gained with people only reading what they want to read or believing that what applies to one person on a crap PC also applies to them on a decent one. People are sheep.

 

[throdgrain]

I've still got XP

 

[MYstIC G]

It's fine so far, tried it out by upgrading to start with. The install took ages but 7 runs much faster than vista. My only question so far is does anyone know how to stop the taskbar being transparent, it's quite annoying seeing just 30 odd pixels of my desktop background.

 

[TdC]

dude, I haven't been able to find how to do just the TB, but if you go to

Control Panel\Appearance and Personalization\Personalization\Window Color and Appearance

there's a tickbutton to turn on/off transparancy for all windows incl the TB.

 

[nath]

Thing that annoys me about the taskbar is that it doesn't seem possible to create a shortcut directly to a folder on it. I used to have a link on my quicklaunch directly to a specific folder but when I pin it, then click it I get "Library" not that folder. I have to right click the icon to get the option for this folder.

Anyone know a way around this?

Also smurkin - dunno why you had trouble getting MKV support. I installed CCCP (combined community codec pack) and it worked immediately.

 

[MYstIC G]

No, it pins them to explorer afaik (right mb drag a folder to the taskbar and it will say "pin to explorer"). This creates a link when you right click that Library icon.

Perhaps try and remove the "grouping" option in the Start Menu options.

 

[TdC]

Thing that annoys me about the taskbar is that it doesn't seem possible to create a shortcut directly to a folder on it. I used to have a link on my quicklaunch directly to a specific folder but when I pin it, then click it I get "Library" not that folder. I have to right click the icon to get the option for this folder.

Anyone know a way around this?

Also smurkin - dunno why you had trouble getting MKV support. I installed CCCP (combined community codec pack) and it worked immediately.

yeah I noticed that too. everything that has anything at all to do with explorer gets swallowed by the explorer pin. I wonder what happens if you unpin that?

 

[nath]

First thing I tried was to unpin the explorer icon and create a new one directly to this folder. No joy.

Also, I disabled grouping straight away too and that hasn't done it :\.

 

[Embattle]

Not ideal but:

UNAWAVE - Windows 7 Pin folder to taskbar

 

[nath]

Figured there'd be a wacky way of getting around it. Cheers for that .

 

[TdC]

wow, that's impressive. I'd never had thought of that. At the same time, makes me wonder why MS thought it would be a good idea to not allow it, or thinking that pinning to the explorer button would be a better idea.

Really interested in the reasoning behind it tbh.

 

[MYstIC G]

Oh that reminds me, just for the fun of it I didn't enter my product code and unticked the "authorise" shit. The installer just let it finish up.

 

[Ctuchik]

iirc that means u can use it for 30 days but after that it will shut off the PC every 2 hours untill you register it.

 

[MYstIC G]

Works for me, I wanted to move my shit off before doing a 64bit install of it and wasn't sure if I activated it under 32-bit if it would cause problems.

 

[soze]

It looks like you get between 5 and 10 activations of the product code before it starts making you speak to someone. So activating 32 bit should not hurt you installing 64 bit.

 

[dysfunction]

I've still got XP

Yes but you love living in the past

 

[Ch3tan]

Yes but you love living in the past

He is the past.

 

[dysfunction]

If you doing a fresh install of windows this may be useful to get some of your Apps installed all in one go!

Ninite Easy PC Setup and Multiple App Installer - Great For Win7 Upgrades

 

[MYstIC G]

Very cool Dys. I can install in one hit once home, nice.