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Win 7 Beta

I have been using it for 14 days already. Looks like they have axed tons of device drivers for older equipment. Most of my circa 2002 2003 laptops were forced to use VESA vga modes. Which is a pain when you have a 1280 x 800 LCD screen. The sis650 driver locks up solid on this Compaq 3045US laptop. Again, have to do a driver rollback to the VESA vga driver. I also had to do a lot of "go find the device driver disk for XP" to get other devices to work properly.
 
I've had the DVD sitting here for about a month. I suppose I should install it sometime and give it a try.

Thanks for the tip, Chuck, I'll pull out my XPP CD and have it ready.
 
yep, thats pretty nice how they're doing that. a few weeks ago i installed win7 beta on a lowly 866 MHz pentium 3 with 512 MB of ram, and i was shocked at how smoothly it ran on that system.

win7 is looking awesome so far, imo.
 
I'm using it on currently 3 of my laptops

A HP Compaq NC6000 with ATI Graphics
A Philips Freevents something Dualcore and Intel Gfx
A Toshiba Low-cost Celeron based / ATI graphics Equium laptop

All 3 work like a charm, and they run flawless. The drivers that did not work after install was downloaded automatically from Windows Update.

Suspend - Resume works EVERY time, wireless also catches up every time after a resume. On all 3 laptops. Finally they did something right :)
 
I've only just upgraded to XP so i think it will be some time before I try something new.......
But i will certainly keep my eyes open to see what ou guys think of it.
 
Downloading it now using Ubuntu 8.10. Thanks for the link!

I'm surprised to hear it works so well on a PIII....well after the first "update" that will be history.

Download is gawdawful slow, I'm at 1.3MB/s right now. Ugh! When I downloaded Linux awhile back, I was seeing 22MB/s! Ahh...FIOS. Looking at about another hour.

--Ryan
 
I'm curious as to if they changed the driver model again. Fingers crossed that my EPROM programmer will work. ;)

I love my FIOS. I downloaded it in about 10 minutes today.

I do have to say that no matter WHAT I did in IE7 under Vista, I could not get it to install that damn download ActiveX for Akamai to do the download. It wouldn't even use the Java installer. I had to download and install Firefox to get a download from microsoft.com to work!
 
Has anyone tested it under VMware Server?

That's how I'll try their beta. :D

My Vista machine has 4Gb of RAM and 500Gb of disk space. I use a big chunk of that running other computers virtually within it for developing training materials and for learning new software.

RJ
 
I Installed it a few weeks ago and am fairly impressed with it. It picked up all of my devices with the exception of a 5 year old HP printer.

I was actually able to use HPs 32bit Windows XP driver to install the printer and when I did, windows update finally "saw" the printer and installed the new correct driver.

It seems to run great on hardware that's less than 2 years old.

The best thing was when I got out my 18 year old disk of Windows Entertainment Pack for win 3.0 and installed it from floppy.

Sadly this is going to be the last version of windows with a 32 bit version and the last version period with 16 bit Windows support.
 
channelmaniac said:
Has anyone tested it under VMware Server?

That's how I'll try their beta. :D

My Vista machine has 4Gb of RAM and 500Gb of disk space. I use a big chunk of that running other computers virtually within it for developing training materials and for learning new software.

RJ
Click to expand...

I've run the pre-beta in Microsoft's VPC2007 under XP64 Pro. It ran a bit slowly, but quite usably.
 
My HP a1483w:

AMD 64x2 2.2GHz
2.5GB RAM
250GB SATA(Windows XP & restore exclusively)
160GB IDE(Ubuntu 8.10(60GB) Win7(40GB) Empty(40GB). Rest is swap and such)
256MB Video card, dual monitor ports
CDRW/DVDRW Lightscribe
2 Firewire ports, 7 USB, Mem. card reader, assorted audio(including HD)
3.5 1.44MB floppy drive

I'm stunned as to how well my machine runs Windows 7 in comparison to Vista's performance with a previous machine. My last HP had a P4 2.8GHz, and otherwise similair specs, but with 3.5GB RAM. It ran horribly and was gone in a week. But really, this is fantastic. For once they've made a Windows that will run with all the bells and whistles on a machine thats already out there and not heavily upgraded. I upgraded mine to an additional 512MB RAM, a 160GB IDE HDD, the video card, and the floppy drive. I'd expect that Windows would run pretty well without those things. Better, as a matter of fact, if it were on the SATA drive, as disk performance would be a bit quicker.

Installation was a snap. I had to tell it not much more than my product key. It installed fully the rest of the way without a thing from me. I hated how the previous versions would stop dead in their tracks until I gave it input. I'd start installation and dissapear, expecting it to be done when I got back. But instead, it was 5 minutes through and wanted the time and date. This version installs completely, finds most of the information itself, and asks a few questions at the very end of installation. Bravo, Microsoft.

Of course, seems it was free, I've been installing all the newest stuff I never usually get. Like Live messenger, Silverlight, and the such. I usually use Trillian, but I don't think it'll work, as it doesn't have a Windows 7 version yet. Oh, and it recognized all my devices automatically, except my Logitech Webcam. Still toying with getting that to work, but the rest seems to be fine. Afterall, this machine is labelled Vista Capable, but came with Windows XP Media Center.

Windows 7 ranks up there NEAR Linux, at least until it costs $300 to install. I may buy Vista when Premium is only like $100-$150.

--Ryan
EDIT: Turns out Vista Premium is $130. Next plan: Get money, wait for Windows 7 to come out, buy Vista when price drops. Furthermore, Windows 7 download is the Ultimate edition. So if it comes out and you buy Basic, don't expect it to be as cool.
 
hello all,
Wow, my co worker just got it installed finally on his laptop. He says he is loving it so much more than Vista or XP. The launch bar is a bit different, and he says it is not so resource heavy to load either.

I am looking forward to trying it as I am not a Vista lover, really don't like some of its quirks.
 
It's been a better day than it could've been. Did I miss something? I thought "njwoods"'s post sounded legit, but maybe I'm reading it wrong...

--Ryan
 
His sig line is a link to a commercial website offering "e-learning" programs. Spammers often post in forums on semi-obscure websites and include a link to their website, thus raising their hit count/page rank when Google or Yahoo's search bots read the page.
 
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