By Alec Meer on May 6th, 2009 at 5:55 pm.
Don’t worry – I’m not going to inflict a blow-by-blow technical details post on you. This is more to point out that the Release Candidate 1 for Microsoft’s next operating system is now free to all comers, and to address the question of whether we gamers should care about it a lot, a little, or not even slightly.
Personally, I’m going full-pelt for a yes, whether you’re running Vista or good ol’XP. It’s free from a lot of the bloat and associated chugginess of the former, but adds in a spot of whizzbang and the DirectX 10 support (and 11 too, in theory) that that the latter lacks. Best of all, RC1 will continue to run until July 2010. So if you haven’t yet moved from XP to Vista and have a DX10 card, you now get to try it (and DX10′s) best bits without spending a penny or breaking any laws. I’ve been running an earlier version 7 as my main OS for a while now, and I can honestly say I’ve been a lot happier with it than I ever was with XP or Vista. It’s definitely a better option for a laptop or other lower-spec system than any version of Vista, as it’s far less memory hungry.
A Release Candidate, incidentally, is just that – a fundamentally finished version that Microsoft hopes is fit for release. The major wrinkle with it is that you’ll not be able to simply upgrade to the final, final version come July 2010 (or whenever you end up buying Win 7, which is due for release later this year), but rather will have to do a whole new install. So this is probably a second-hard-drive job, unless you subscribe to the philosophy that giving your Windows a thorough clean every now and again keeps performance tip-top.
For all Microsoft’s bally-hoo, there aren’t really any gaming-specific features worth trumpeting in either Vista or Win 7 (bar the fact that a 3D card driver crash doesn’t usually require a system restart, but can instead recover itself), but it’s definitely a nicer desktop environment than, arguably, any other Windows to date. If I get the chance, I’ll run some comparative benchmarks to see gaming performance stacks against XP and VIsta in hard numbers. Grab RC1 (in either 32 or 64 bit flavours) from here – it’s only 2.5Gb, surprisingly.
06/05/2009 at 18:00 Real Horrorshow says:
If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. I haven’t had any issues with Vista as long as I’ve had it. Everything works fine, so I’m not going to complicate things by upgrading OS’ just for a snazzier interface.
06/05/2009 at 18:00 prowlinger says:
We have it installed here at work on 2 systems…
As far as a home system… works great… business minded systems… still chock full of bloat.
We tested out Creative Lab drivers (hacked unofficial Win7 since Creative refuses to ever update their drivers for non new cards) and are testing Geforce 9 drivers.
Games so far seem about -15% to -25% slower than on regular XP.
Why? Win7 uses aero and still has a mash of junk that isn’t always needed.
If you want pure speed on a non new system… stick with XP for another year… ;)
06/05/2009 at 18:03 Schmung says:
I’ve stayed away from Vista with an almost religious fervor since it’s release, but Win7 seems like it might be worth looking at. It does silly in some ways that I’m here using a 32 bit OS with a 64 bit processor and 4gb of RAM, but I just know that there’s going to be a ton of stuff that doesn’t work properly with it, so I’m a bit tentative. If I can find the cables for my power supply I may just whack in another hard drive and give it a go. Hopefully some clever sorts will fix it so you can upgrade from the RC when the full version comes out.
06/05/2009 at 18:06 ack says:
And after you’ve tried it and installed XP again you’ll have to buy new games ’cause you’ve passed the number of allowed re-installs…
(see there, I managed to squeeze in DRM in a discussion about something totally different. woo! look at me!)
06/05/2009 at 18:09 The_B says:
This has been the only thing preventing me from literally upgrading my current installation and abandoning Vista altogether. I have it installed on my second hard drive for now, and the fact that all my programs are on my Vista – in addition to only recently getting everything back to normaility after a massive hardware failure at Christmas – means I’m reluctant to rely on it and then having to mess around again come the full version.
However, I dare say Windows 7 will be a purchase for me when it comes out as I do rather like it. It’s literally just circumstances meaning Vista remains my primary OS for now. I’ve not tried the new XP mode that wasn’t in the inital beta, but I have heard good things…
06/05/2009 at 18:10 Novotny says:
I’ve been using it for 6 months over three builds and love it. Haven’t booted to XP since about day two.
06/05/2009 at 18:14 El_MUERkO says:
i’m tempted to stick it on my netbook … but not until i have confidence scummvm will work with it
06/05/2009 at 18:15 Nero says:
I might try it, or not. Still using XP and right now I see no reason at all to upgrade. I will probably skip Vista all together and possibly upgrade to 7 when there’s something I want that only works there.
06/05/2009 at 18:20 Dave says:
Isn’t there some kind of restriction on the RC version where it forces a reboot every 2 hours after May? Something like that, anyway.
06/05/2009 at 18:21 Ginger Yellow says:
I’ve just about got Vista to a state where I’m happy with it, so I’d rather not upgrade to something uncertain with built-in obsolescence. I’ll almost certainly be switching to it when it’s properly released, though.
06/05/2009 at 18:24 357SIG says:
I’ve been using vista for a couple years now and I admit it had its flaws but try using XP without service packs. I’m currently happy with vista and awaiting release of win7
i can cite my specs if needed but i have a relatively affordable machine and i play crysis smoothly in DX10 maxed at 1920×1080
06/05/2009 at 18:27 Sirtuin says:
I have had beta as primary OS since January and just did clean RC install and IMO Win 7 is the best Windows ever. Desktop use feels much more comfortable and games I’ve tried have run as well or better than on XP, especially strange hiccups with Crysis and Company of Heroes seem to be gone.
06/05/2009 at 18:28 Axess Denyd says:
I had the Beta on my MSI Wind for a few weeks and was impressed at how well it performed. I ended up getting rid of it since it wouldn’t run the games that the Wind is capable of.
Both Civ3 and Bullet Candy would refuse to do anything at all when launched from Steam–hopefully this can be addressed in a patch or with different settings, but if I’m gonna have a netbook I’m gonna need it to run old games.
06/05/2009 at 18:32 bluedino says:
Any one else notice a significant loss of performance in games, say compared to xp? I’ve been thinking about upgrading my main computer so I can use DX10 when I start clear sky, but STALKER games aren’t exactly optimized…
06/05/2009 at 18:33 Chris Evans says:
I grabbed the Win7 beta as soon as it came out and I haven’t looked back since. I have a dual boot on my desktop with Win7 beta and Vista. Haven’t touched Vista since a couple days after get Win7.
I won’t be getting RC1 quite yet, I think a new hard drive is in order soon enough, 250GB just doesn’t cut it for me now. I think bigger HD with Win7 RC1 is the way to go personally.
To those XP users, I don’t know how you can still be using that. As soon as I could put Vista on my desktop I did, I think the bad press about Vista did it in. Yes it is bloaty, but not as bad as everyone thinks.
Here is to Win7 *raises a glass*
06/05/2009 at 18:36 Cigol says:
Vista was relatively awful to begin with but it’s definitely usuable now. Win7 on the otherhand blows it out of the water, so if you have been put off by Vista don’t assume it’s the same deal with Win7 – it’s not. You’ll be getting rid of WinXP before long.
06/05/2009 at 18:36 pepper says:
I’d say your in good water when upgrading the rig closely to the win 7 release or afterwards, from what ive seen its doing quite well. But i wouldnt know for sure since i havent given it a try yet on any of my own system.
06/05/2009 at 18:38 Bhazor says:
Reply to Dave
“The RC will expire on June 1, 2010. Starting on March 1, 2010, your PC will begin shutting down every two hours. Windows will notify you two weeks before the bi-hourly shutdowns start.”
So thats a no then.
06/05/2009 at 18:41 Piso Mojado says:
I agree with Real. Vista’s been good for me so I’ll just wait for the official release of Win7 in the fall. Also note:
“The Release Candidate will stop working on June 1, 2010, but starting on March 1, 2010, your PC will begin shutting down every two hours.” – Wired.com
06/05/2009 at 18:46 Theory says:
Surprised to see these reactions. I got rid of 7 after about a week because it wasn’t enough of an improvement over Vista to justify porting all my settings, DRM etc. to it.
06/05/2009 at 18:48 Hax Meadroom says:
The problem is that Windows 7 is great if you liked the idea of Vista but not the execution. I, however, loathed Vista and I do not see any real feature-based improvements in 7; you still have a start ‘orb’ (whose idea was this anyway), still have UAC and Administrative privilege issues breathing down your neck much of the time, still have one hell of a memory hog, etc.. As with Vista, the only real appeal for me is DirectX but again as with Vista, that is no incentive at all (until DX11 anyway). And for the record, I used the beta of 7 for about three weeks and switched back when I didn’t see the point in using it any longer.
06/05/2009 at 18:49 ErrantConstruct says:
“Starting on March 1, 2010, your PC will begin shutting down every two hours”
The usability of the RC is slightly shorter than mentioned in the article. Seems a rather draconian way to get people to upgrade, and its a whole 5 months before they cut it off. I guess it becomes a sort of time locked OS demo at that point. Although I wouldn’t think someone would want to go through the trouble of installing it just to try it out for 2 hours at a time. Why not just have it end in March?
06/05/2009 at 18:49 hitnrun says:
@Real Horrorshow
You realize that’s generally the argument *against* using Vista, right?
06/05/2009 at 18:50 Wacky says:
I’ve tried to install it for 2 days now and it always restarts unexpectedly right near the end,and I have to rollback the installation,so my “experience” with WIndows 7 has been sort of unsatisfactory.
06/05/2009 at 18:52 Rich_P says:
Pros: Elemental War of Magic might ship with a 64-bit exe that allows you to create huge maps. That’s the only gaming-related motivation to upgrade, at the moment at least.
Cons: I don’t feel like reinstalling Windows on my duel-boot Linux machine.
06/05/2009 at 18:54 Markoff Chaney says:
Until a few months back Vista was a good 10-15% slower when gaming as opposed to XP. I’m still running XP mainly when I game for just that reason (that + laziness and no desire to rebuild a machine with a few hundred gigs of installs for something that just caught up to what I’m still using). Snazzy and Sexy don’t mean anything when I just want my stuff to run the best it can. But I started off my game optimizing career by changing the order that QEMM loaded stuff from config.sys so I don’t mind sticking with the older stuff, especially if it offers stability and speed increases.
That being said, Vista (since SP1) really isn’t bad at all. I’ve been playing with different betas of 7 and this RC is nicely polished (for being a RC, doubly so for being a MicroSoft OS RC). I’m planning on overwriting my Vista partition with 7 sometime this weekend. I’m leery of the restrictions, but I’ll be more than ready for a reformat within a year anyway (laziness or not). At least I’m not doing my 6 month reformat cycle anymore. It does help speed things up, but there is such a thing as a law of diminishing returns eventually and XP isn’t as bad as the 9Xes (and priors) were.
06/05/2009 at 18:58 Butler` says:
My yearly reformat is due after my exams, so I’ll give this a try.
If it isn’t up to scratch I’ll be performing an impromptu second reformat this year.
Be nice to see some opinions on those actually play games in W7, from CS, to WoW, to whatever.
06/05/2009 at 19:06 Tom says:
I’m installing it this weekend. Can’t wait!
06/05/2009 at 19:10 Dominic White says:
I loathed Vista, but the Windows 7 beta (I dual-booted – made a seperate W7 partition and put it there so I wouldn’t lose XP) impressed me no end. It starts up faster, it does things quicker, and there’s almost none of the HD/memory/pagefile churn that XP is laden with. Plus, it uses my 64bit dual-core processor pretty damn well.
The best thing is that it’s free until next year. I’m a little short on disposable income, so couldn’t afford an OS upgrade, but being able to install and use it now, and pay a year later is pretty great.
06/05/2009 at 19:22 jackflash says:
I’ll probably stick with XP for gaming needs and OpenSUSE with KDE for having an OS I actually like.
06/05/2009 at 19:23 The_B says:
I wouldn’t really call it draconian – for a start by the time it even kicks in Windows 7′s Real Thing should have been out for a good few months anyway, and if you’re using it as your be all and end all without intending to upgrade later you’re either a bit silly or incredibly short sighted.
It’s an OS so to the general public at large they’re probably barely going to notice anything futher thanwhat they might discover in those first two hours before they’re launching a game or program with the thing anyway.
And to those that say it’s not hugely different from Vista – while that may be true on some levels, I dare say the question for the majority isn’t going to be whether they should update from Vista, but from XP. To those, it’s looking like a solid yes.
06/05/2009 at 19:25 Acosta says:
I must say that I’m really happy with Vista 64, very stable, fast, no compatibility problems. I have a basic rule with windows about not getting it until SP1 is released, and it has worked fine for me.
I won’t install it, I will get a proper Windows 7+SP1 when I get my next PC in one year or so.
06/05/2009 at 19:25 copperfish says:
I switched to Ubuntu because of Vista. Not because of any anti Microsoft fervour, I do own an Xbox but just because it was better than both Vista and XP. XP just wasn’t cutting it in features and Vista was afwul. Windows 7 seems to be getting things right and I’ll be happy to get back into PC gaming with Windows 7. That said, I won’t be abandoning Ubuntu either.
06/05/2009 at 19:29 Joshua says:
I have had Windows XP installed on my comp since I built it (in early 2006) and amazingly have not wiped. But now its unbearably slow and in a couple weeks I was planning to wipe it and start clean. I figure I’ll go with this, I am planning to buy a Win7 license when it comes out anyway.
The only thing is, my comp is older, uses DDR1 RAM, and I only have 2 gigs. I don’t want to tack on another 2 gigs to this ancient machine (ancient = 2006) but I don’t really to build another computer.
06/05/2009 at 19:36 jalf says:
I’ve been running the Win7 beta since it came out, and upgraded to the RC yesterday. It’s so much nicer to use than Vista, and on the whole, comparable to XP. In some ways it’s vastly improved over XP, but it has also inherited a handful of annoyances from Vista (Why is it that Explorer, in particular, becomes more and more unusable with every Windows release?)
The main reason I switch from XP to 7 was, ironically, better driver support. My motherboard wasn’t really happy with XP, and I got terrible harddrive performance (ingame movies were choppy and froze for seconds at a time)
7 is not perfect, but unlike Vista, it offers a good number of new improvements as well as annoyances (the latter mainly originating from Vista).
06/05/2009 at 19:36 monchberter says:
I like it, i’ve been running the 64bit beta for a couple of months and the RC since yesterday although it does seem a bit flakier than the 32 bit.
My biggest surprise was having Crysis run better in DX10 maxed out than it did in DX9 in XP! Although the extra gig and a half of memory (XP RAM restrictions) may have something to do with it.
Not going back now. Too comfortable.
06/05/2009 at 19:41 Solar says:
Too busy to fiddle with my OS atm. Running Vista x64 Home Premium since release and only had problems in the first month or two with graphics and wireless drivers. After that nil problemo, minus an actual blue screen of death two months ago…
Don’t have any benchmark comparisons and haven’t looked at Win 7 RC but really don’t want to go through the driver problem at this moment in time. Due for a rig upgrade some time Q4 I reckon so might as well wait for win 7 release (not that I feel any way inclined to leave visa, web updates have left it stable as a Tall-nut, om nom nom).
Tinker away little OS monkeys and let me know what you find.
06/05/2009 at 19:46 jalf says:
@Solar: There aren’t really driver issues with Win7. Vista drivers are compatible with it, and NVidia in particular are producing drivers like crazy, presumably to avoid the trouble they ended up in at Vista’s launch.
Not saying you should upgrade though. If you’ve got a working OS, why change? :p
Just pointing out that you’re not likely to encounter driver issues with Win7 now or at launch. Microsoft has learned that lesson from Vista ;)
06/05/2009 at 19:48 Sam says:
I must say, I’m perfectly happy with OSX + Ubuntu Linux as my main OSes.
(I do think, btw, that it’s a bit odd to go on about bringing DirectX 10 to the masses – it’s not like it gives you anything that OpenGL 2.x does, from a gamer’s perspective. And XP drivers support OpenGL 2.x just fine…)
06/05/2009 at 19:50 Krondonian says:
I seem to remember some speed tests of older versions of Windows 7 matching XP for speed/framerate.
For a complete beginner to this stuff, how easy is to set up a partition and dual boot XP and Windows 7? I have a 500GB hard drive, with about 350 free if that makes a difference.
06/05/2009 at 19:58 Steve says:
I’m really irritated by the irrational and uninformed hate for Vista. With SP1 it runs perfectly well provided you have sufficiently good hardware. I’ve certainly experienced no “sluggishness” with my moderately equipped PC.
I’ll probably upgrade, providing there’s good driver support for the 64bit version.
06/05/2009 at 19:58 Nelson says:
It’s sad that advances in gaming tech have been hampered by OS issues. I’m still rocking XP and very glad of it. I don’t feel any need to have DX10 since there are (still!) only a handful of games that require it.
Unless the industry starts requiring DX10 (& 11) to run games -or- offers some kind of tremendous discount on products to urge gamers to buy, I don’t think most gamers will care about a new OS. :( What I’d love to see, is an OS version dedicated to gaming–that would show me that Microsoft still cares about us!
06/05/2009 at 20:05 The_B says:
Insert your own ‘XBox 360′ joke here.
06/05/2009 at 20:09 Steven Hutton says:
I upgraded to RC1 in the hope that refomatting my PC would fix the crashes I was getting with Demigod and World in Conflict. Short answer: It didn’t. Long answer: It didn’t and I’m never buying another PC game.
06/05/2009 at 20:14 jalf says:
@Steve: Yeah, and Crysis ran perfectly well when it came out provided you had sufficiently good hardware too. A much more relevant question is “does it run perfectly well on *common* hardware? Or even more relevant, how does its performance compare to other OS’es *running on the same hardware*? Of course it is possible to get *good enough* hardware to satisfy Vista. But if Vista requires twice as hefty hardware as XP, OSX or Linux, then it is still a problem. Vista runs slower *on the same hardware* than both XP and Win7. That could be acceptable, if it offered anything interesting in return. But as far as I’m concerned, it doesn’t.
Apart from that, performance is, and was, always the least of my complaints with Vista. So I’d say the irrational and uninformed defense of Vista is far more annoying. Somehow, it doesn’t matter what you criticize about Vista, its defenders are going to talk about a completely different issue. “I hate how they removed the ‘up’ button in Explorer” / “Yeah, but I have no performance issues on my PC”. Well done, good for you, it just doesn’t answer my complaint.
Or “Performance in Vista sucks” / “Well, I’ve had no bluescreens since I installed it”
Or “Vista just bluescreened for me” / “Well, it has Aero, it looks much nicer”.
I can think of plenty of criticisms for Vista. Some of them have been resolved over time, but most are as valid today as they were at launch, because they were by design. The performance has gone from horrendous to acceptable, but most of the other issues have not changed. I dislike Vista *as a product*. Not because of performance or lack of polish, but because it is quite simply a pain to use.
06/05/2009 at 20:20 Black Mamba says:
Well one more reason, you can play back your MKV videos in the Xbox 360 media center extender with this Win7 media foundation MKV plugin from DivX. No transcoding going on this is native playback.
http://labs.divx.com/mkvwin7preview
It needs Win7 because the native codecs (H.264/XviD/VC-1/AAC etc) built into Win7 are doing the decoding, the MKV plugin just makes WMP12/WMC7 see MKV containers.
06/05/2009 at 20:22 Cunk says:
@ Hax Meadroom
“you still have a start ‘orb’ (whose idea was this anyway)”
Not sure what the problem with an ‘orb’ is. Same function as a ‘Start’ button. Just looks a little different (and cleaner IMO)
“still have UAC and Administrative privilege issues breathing down your neck much of the time”
UAC is one of the most important changes in Windows since NTFS. Finally they are steering the OS in a direction where applications only get the privileges they absolutely need. Sure it’s a minor pain for old apps (just set them to run as administrator) but in general it’s hardly as troublesome as some people like to make it out to be. I rarely even think about it.
“still have one hell of a memory hog,”
Don’t be mislead by the memory use reported by Task Manager. Vista grabs all the RAM it can for optimization purposes and readily releases it as applications need it. Basically it’s using memory that normally sits there idle.
06/05/2009 at 20:28 AksumkA says:
I just got done installing Win7 on my rig. I’m done with XP now. I’ve been using the beta on my laptop since it was released and did not have a single problem with it.
If anything, XP was giving me problems.
<3 Win7!
06/05/2009 at 20:44 Vinraith says:
Gamers are never well served to upgrade their operating system until a certain critical mass of games on the market demand that they do so (usually 2 years after release or thereabouts). Until then, the problems always outweigh whatever meager benefits the new whizzbang gizmos of the new OS may provide.
I’ll stick with XP until forced to give it up by a game I can’t pass on, plain and simple. I’ll go ahead and predict 2011 or 2012.
06/05/2009 at 20:50 Markoff Chaney says:
I am consistently reminded of one of my favorite aphorisms when reading some of these comments regarding stability and/or performance – “The plural of anecdote is not data”. Pretty self evident, really.
06/05/2009 at 20:56 Kanakotka says:
Vista has never worked for me, in each of it’s appliances on any system it has ever been, XP has proven itself to be miles ahead of it in just about every way. It seems that Win7 seems a worthy follow up to XP, and even seems to run a plenty better in some cases, from what little benchmarks i’ve looked at.
And yeah, anyone who claims Vista is a good OS should have their head’s checked. Then again, prolonged use of a bad product usually results in blindness towards it flaws. Believe me, it’ll pass in moments of upgrading to a much better system… unless you prefer being a stubborn mule, which in such a situation is usually the case.
@Steven Hutton: It is not the computer or operating system’s problem if there is either an UUTPC (Uninformed User’s Third Party Conflict) or RSH-error (Rusty, Shitty Hardware), both resulting from EBKnC (Error Between Keyboard and Chair). An operating system change will not magically fix a broken PSU, for example, and venting against PC games in general just makes you look even more silly.
06/05/2009 at 21:01 Novotny says:
That’s a superb line, Markoff.
Must say I’m impressed with the general level of dialogue. Makes Slashdot seem quite kindergarten. Perhaps that’s not difficult anymore.
06/05/2009 at 21:05 jonfitt says:
I see no reason to upgrade from XP. I see little attraction in the few DX10 features, and I could care less about the shiny interface. My gaming PC’s operating system is a means to an end, and that end involves blocking out the entire screen with a game.
If there is even the hint of requiring more resources to perform its sole function (see above), then it is not an upgrade.
When games start requiring something XP cannot provide, then I’ll upgrade.
06/05/2009 at 21:08 Floweringmind says:
I won’t touch Windows 7. Vista was bad and Windows 7 is worse when it comes to the GUI.
I have been converting over to Mint Linux based on Ubuntu. Fits on 1 CD has all drivers, boots in 18 seconds or less, super nice UI, totally customizable, can run Runes of Magic under Wine. Vmware with WinXP allows other directx games that wine doesn’t support yet,
06/05/2009 at 21:10 jalf says:
@Kanakotka: Much the same argument could be used against XP though. Anyone who claim that is a good OS should have their heads checked as well. And most XP users are certainly blind towards its faults. And that too pass within moments of upgrading. Let’s not get carried away here. Vista may have frustrated the hell out of me, but let’s not pretend XP was perfect either. And nor is win7, while we’re at it.
It’s not really a question of which, if any, is a “good” OS (I’m skeptical as to whether such a beast even exists), but rather which set of annoyances you’d prefer.
06/05/2009 at 21:21 Ravelle says:
If you like XP there is indeed no reason to switch to Windows 7 but there might still the problem that they stop making updates for XP and create Windows 7 Only Games, like they did with Halo 2.
06/05/2009 at 21:34 subedii says:
I’ve been hearing a lot of praise for Windows 7′s performance, but like others, I’ve had a fine experience with Vista. So I’m going to hold fire on an upgrade until maybe a year or so in and the first service pack.
06/05/2009 at 21:54 Moonracer says:
I’ll probably just stick with XP for a while longer. It’ll probably be a year or so before this operating system is running “smoothly”. It will be interesting to see if games start coming out with three columns of recommended system specs (XP/Vista/ Win 7) and how they will compare.
06/05/2009 at 22:38 Petethegoat says:
I tried the Windows 7 beta a while back, and found it very likeable indeed. I plan to duel-boot 7 and XP, if everything works as it should.
06/05/2009 at 22:38 gbarules2999 says:
The beta ran okay, but there were no real upgrades to speak of. I wish I cared, but Ubuntu works just fine for me. However, I have to say that doing tech support for other Windows users will be marginally easier with Win7 here.
Windows is strictly gaming console OS for me at this point, so I’ll go with Win7 for DirectX 10 or 11. That’s really the only reason I have for not using XP at this point. And “free for a few months” never hurts.
06/05/2009 at 22:39 bookworm8at says:
I also only boot into Windows for games and I will only buy a new license when I absolutely have to (e.g. if games I want to play do not support XP anymore).
However, even if I wouldn’t run Ubuntu, I would still feel the need to have a separate instance for games:
- I want my system configured differently in “gaming mode” than in “normal mode” . Services like steam and the impulse updater may run in the background when I’m playing, but not when I do something else. I do not want Anti Virus Software in gaming mode, and there should be no software firewall at all when I play.
- All these third party apps (mods, editors and of course the games) are not trustworty and often poorly programmed. They also slow down a windows system over time, no matter how much registry cleaning or defragmentation or service cleaning or whatever you do. Third party game apps are often poorly designed and require root access, which you should never allow on a machine you need to be reliable.
- drm services like securom are much less frightening when they are restricted to the gaming environment.
- And most important: I do not want to be able to initiate a “short Demigod Break from work” with a single click . That’s madness. The ubiquitous Battle of Wesnoth is worse enough in this regard.
06/05/2009 at 22:45 Gorgeras says:
Question: is it possible to install this on a hard drive without re-formatting or am I going to lose everything? Currently using Vista.
Come to think of it, I don’t actually have much I’m desperate to keep. But still good to know.
06/05/2009 at 22:49 Kadayi says:
Tempting as it is with all the good talk of W7, the sheer ass of migrating everything from my present Vista (64) install onto it for the sake of a few months of noodling before the real version comes out kind of puts me off as well. If it was a case that you could try and buy without the necessity to carry out a complete reinstall down the road I might be tempted, but when you’ve at least a weekends worth of application installations (and the inevitable updating) that will need to go on there as well, the enthusiasm dampens somewhat……
06/05/2009 at 23:11 piphil says:
Installed the RC yesterday. I haven’t managed to get any games installed yet (plus I’m currently writing up my PhD thesis, so I’m a little low on gaming time atm…) but I have to say I’m reasonably impressed with a number of features included with the RC that weren’t in the beta.
The major improvement for me is in compatibility. Windows 7 seems to realise when programs or drivers have failed to install – my printer’s drivers being one I can remember off the top of my head. A window pops up offering to run the program under “recommended settings” and the installation is set in motion again. I’m assuming that it simply tells the program that it’s in fact installing on Vista, and it’s worked flawlessly so far.
Less impressive is that the much talked about XP “Virtual PC” for running older programs. This is only supported if you have specific processors with virtualisation technology – i.e. not my cheap and cheerful E2160. Thankfully there are other 3rd party options available.
I think Microsoft have managed to get it right. There’s less general bloat than Vista, it looks nicer and feels responsive, and the taskbar is a nice re-imagining of the original concept. I’m pretty much sold, although ironically I’m not entirely sure if I’ll have the money to buy the full version when the RC is phased out. I guess otherwise it’ll be back to XP…
06/05/2009 at 23:32 AukonDK says:
Been using the beta for a while now and will install the RC at the weekend. The thing I like the most is the fact I don’t have to go driver hunting on my old hardware. To install XP involves plugging in a floppy drive with my sata drivers directly into the MB and use a separate machine to find the NIC drivers before i can even start pulling down all the other updates. Win 7 has most things out of the box and actually feels as up to date as my main linux system.
07/05/2009 at 00:01 frymaster says:
at this risk of sounding fanboy-ish what is this vista “bloat” of which people speak? I’ve not seen any of it, and win 7 certainly doesn’t remove any “bloat” features from vista (though it _is_ faster, due to improvements in UI concurrency, for instance, rather than removal of features – http://blogs.msdn.com/e7/archive/2009/04/25/engineering-windows-7-for-graphics-performance.aspx)
All I’ve notices with vista is a tendency to make use of my disk drive when I’m not otherwise using it, to update search indexes, pre-emptively cache data etc. – but as i’m not actually using the drive when this happens, it doesn’t bother me
I think it’s related to the fact that “hard drive noise” is subliminally linked to “my pc is making an effort” in a lot of people’s minds (I certainly think my ancient work PC is running better than it is when i’m remoted into it, because I can’t hear the noise)
07/05/2009 at 00:13 gbarules2999 says:
@frymaster: You’d see the bloat if you ran a gig of RAM or less.
Most people don’t anymore, so it’s a moot point, but at Vista’s release a gig was fairly uncommon (to the point that it mattered, at least). In the mainstream PC market, having over a gig still is, unless you’ve bought a new computer in the past year or so. Add this to the fact that XP rarely needs over a gig unless the programs you’re running need it (like games) and you see Vista’s bloat.
Add that in to a poor launch where MS and the PC retailers had a mismatch about what exactly “could run Vista well” which some guessed would be around the 512 MB RAM area, which turned out to not be the case. Even XP is a bit pressed for space in that these days.
Does Win7 fix this bloat? A bit. People with newer machines (say, the past year or two) may not notice much of a difference, but others may be a little hopeful.
07/05/2009 at 00:38 Robin says:
I only upgraded to WinXP this year, after using the same Win2K install on my main machine for seven years. I hate the flakiness of XP’s UI (buggy behaviours with focus, taskbar flashing and keyboard events).
I hope to upgrade to Win7 some time next year. The traditional role of the PC as a cutting edge performance hungry games machine is pretty much dead to me, so why not?
07/05/2009 at 01:21 Erlam says:
How good is the, well, security on Windows 7? I’m wondering how my ISP would talk to it, etc, because of the fact it’s a beta OS.
So, yes, security and whatnot – Thumbs up or down?
07/05/2009 at 01:34 jalf says:
@frymaster: If you read some of the other posts on that blog, you’d notice that they’ve *also* does a lot to reduce memory consumption and other kinds of “bloat” compared to Vista. They may not have removed many features, but making the same features consume less resources seems like reducing bloat to me as well.
@Erlam: Security? Basically the same as Vista, with the obvious caveat that it’s beta. No guarantees of anything whatsoever, and it’s not officially supported. But in practice, it is solid. You probably shouldn’t run it on absolutely business-critical systems, but for the rest of us, it’s secure enough that I don’t feel worried about using it.
07/05/2009 at 02:11 Starky says:
The bloat issue is a bit of lie XP fanboys repeated endlessly until it was “fact”.
While granted vista didn’t do too well on systems with only 512MB of ram, it was never supposed too – It was clearly designed with the future in mind even when it was released. It had bad performance issues 90% of which were due to badly coded 3rd party drivers (nvidia, and so on), where XP got adapted windows 2000 drivers at launch.
Added to this is the backwards opinion among many gamers that the more empty RAM you have the better.
people think that if they have 2 gigs of ram and XP tells them that 1.6GB of that is “free” that is good, free to be used by programs they might open, right? Wrong.
RAM is just a cache, nothing more, it exists to store information, empty RAM is wasted ram, and computing is about efficiency.
Vista was the first OS to actually begin using memory as it should be used, as a Cache between the storage medium and the CPU.
That aside nostalgia is key… Or perhaps youth, or forgetfulness rather than nostalgia.
Back when XP launched the same complaints that Vista suffered were level against it (bloat, resource hog so on so forth), why upgrade when win98se, or win2000 were perfect? XP was buggy and broken and ate all your system.
And it did, for a medium spec machine at the time it used about 30-40% of the system RAM, slightly more than vista did compared to a medium spec machine at it’s launch (for medium spec, I tend to look at the current midrange offerings of companies like dell) – it wasn’t until SP1 that Windows XP settled down, and average hardware levels caught up with the requirements.
Then of course people had 6 years to get used to it and love it before Vista.
Then people expected their old and busted machine to run it? Of course not. Just like when XP hit those old and busted Win98 boxes did not stand a chance.
Now before I get accused of been a Vista fanboy myself, let me assure you I’m not, it has issues that I hate (UAC stands out).
Still, the rabid hate it gets is beyond all reason, and stinks of ignorance 90% of the time, especially when coming from gamers.
I can understand businesses ignoring Vista, it offers them very little over XP, and the added “next-gen” overhead is something they like to avoid.
But for a PC gamer, especially an enthusiast (with the hardware to back that claim up), there is no good reason not to move to Vista64 – just as equally there is no point what-so-ever to install vista 32 (stick with XP for 32bit).
It’s a order of magnitude better than XP64.
Hell windows 7 is basically just Vista SP2 – though a smart move from MS to do a rebrand and dump the bad rep of Vista – Still under the hood it’s the same OS in a different configuration – nothing (or very little at least) that has been done to Windows7 to make it the darling it seems to be among reviewers and gamers could not have been done to Vista – and I suspect a lot of it WILL be done to Vista come SP2.
07/05/2009 at 02:27 Sam says:
The upgrade to 7 has appreciably increased the performance of Empire total war for me.
07/05/2009 at 03:04 flo says:
you could trick win7 rc to upgrade from a beta build, i hope it’ll work for the final too.
07/05/2009 at 03:57 gbarules2999 says:
@starky:
“empty RAM is wasted ram”
This is one of the dumbest things I’ve heard in a long time. RAM that’s not being used does not draw power – hence, less power usage. Think laptop batteries – busy RAM wastes the battery for no negligible purpose (especially when it’s come to the point where the hard drive is plenty fast, especially with new SSD stuff). This is a BS argument and has always been such.
And the problem with Vista is that it aimed for the future…which really offered nothing better than XP. Why upgrade? XP works with a gig of RAM just fine. If I wanted to upgrade, that would cost money. I don’t want to spend money for an upgrade that doesn’t offer me anything new (besides DirectX 10, and maybe 64-bit).
Sure, XP stunk at launch, but it got better because it was worth it, in the long run. It was a massive upgrade from 98 (though from 2000 you only got a few new features, such as ClearType stuff). Vista is better now, sort of, but it still has that big overarching question of “Yeah, but so what?”
Win7′s feature set might make me upgrade. We’ll see if it’s worth it.
07/05/2009 at 04:23 PaulMorel says:
Windows 7: Redemption
07/05/2009 at 07:52 Jim says:
Been using the Win7 beta for a good two months and haven’t missed Vista or XP one bit, not had any real compatability problems even with the wankers at Creative hating any new tech that won’t bring them money (I will never ever buy Creative ANYTHING again).
Windows 7 is a joy to use, so much more so than Vista. It really gives the user the power. Anyone worried about UAC can turn it off using a simple slider unlike Vista which gave you no choice. It runs better than Vista even on an old laptop. You can burn ISO files straight to disk with no Alcohol 120% etc. Snapping windows for neat freaks like myself. Ability to just ‘switch off’ Windows features. This is how an OS should be.
07/05/2009 at 08:05 damien says:
i’m a bit surprised that so many posts here talk about changing / reinstalling an OS as some sort of dreaded chore.
i wipe my internal drives and OS installs at least four times yearly. the whole job takes me about two – three hours on a sunday: to reinstall / configure all my core (newest) drivers and utilities and copy back my save games. after the heavy lifting’s done, i leave steam to do its job installing whatever games i want during the next week
its all completely painless, and unless i’ve picked some doozy of a forceware release i have no driver problems, no slowdown over-time and no muss.
07/05/2009 at 09:55 dbdkmezz says:
damien: If you’re reinstalling that often you really need to get hold of Partimage . Will save you a good hour and a half every reinstall. It allows you to make an image of a hard drive, so after you’ve installed and got all 10 million windows updates then just make an image of your C drive. Then, when things start to slow down just restore the image back to your C drive and in 10 minutes you’ll be back to a fresh install.
Just grab a linux boot CD, such as ubuntu’s, boot to linux and run partimage after your next reinstall. No need to install linux or anything, just make sure you put the image somewhere other than the C drive :)
07/05/2009 at 09:59 Subject 706 says:
Installed the RC yesterday. Liked it a lot. The only obvious problem i had was the ole hibernate problem, that seems to have followed me from XP to Vista to Win7.
07/05/2009 at 10:11 Deadjim says:
“Vista or Win 7 (bar the fact that a 3D card driver crash doesn’t usually require a system restart, but can instead recover itself)”
Couldn’t you do this in XP driver roll back?
07/05/2009 at 10:34 psyk says:
People are really gaming with only a gig of ram?
07/05/2009 at 10:36 MD says:
@ psyk: *raises hand*
07/05/2009 at 10:38 Brian says:
@damien
But you sir, have “a clue” :)
07/05/2009 at 11:26 Markoff Chaney says:
I run 6 boxes at home(not counting my wife’s 2 or the others I do upkeep with, just mine I use daily). Rebuilding 4 of those is easy peasy and I can do in a couple hours as well, since they are properly partitioned and I try to only put my OS and apps on my C drive. My gaming box, even though it has all its games on separate partitions as well, is the bear. Some games play nice without needing a reinstall. Some don’t and it’s the digging through everything and firing it back up (even if I haven’t played it in 2 years) that’s the chore on that one. Then it’s disable service time and further tweaking I do to optimize my gaming experience. I guess that’s what I get for living out one of my dreams of trying to keep all my games I want at any time available for me to play at any time I want, independent of a work box. It’s worth it to me, though. :) My work box is a cinch to reload and even my emulation box is significantly easier to set back up than my game box.
There is a perverse pleasure one gets while reinstalling an operating system for the nth time. I personally use nLite to slipstream updates instead of imaging, but I prefer being able to change things from time to time. Work is all about imaging, but down time isn’t allowed there. :)
07/05/2009 at 11:42 groovychainsaw says:
I’ve been running the RC for 2 days now, having used XP forever (vista looked slow and annoying to me!). I’ve deliberately tried out tougher games and older games. Far cry 2 runs great, if anything, looks a bit better and smoother than it did on XP (purely subjective, i know). Crysis seems to have a sound glitch (i put that down to lack of proper chipset drivers at the moment), older games seem to have sprite drawing issues (only tried one or 2). Everything else runs fine. Remember you can run an XP virtual machine on it if you’re trying to get old games going….
As for the interface, coming from XP, its very swish, shiny etc., but also runs just as quickly, if not slightly quicker than XP (from a clean install, mind), its very fast to boot frequently used apps, find programs, and generally be helpful for me. For those complaining about the messages, they are far fewer than those I saw in vista, and can be turned off completely (if you don’t want the security). With them on it seems very similar to xp in terms of nagging.
Oh, and dual-booting setup was easy, i had 2 hard drives, cleaned one, installed 7 on there, gave me a menu to choose on every boot. Perfect. No risk at all to me.
07/05/2009 at 11:51 C0nt1nu1ty says:
I’ve been running the beta for about a month on an Eee and its definatly quicker than Xandros that came with the computer. I’m i’m going to make the jump on my desktop tomorrow primerily to squeeze more power out of the hardware than i can get from vista, that and the new interface will look sweet on my 28 inch screen
07/05/2009 at 11:55 nutterguy says:
Starky is spot on!
So much BS over Vista.
Having said that Windows 7 is also excllent. Have the RC installed on 3 machines now and before that I had been testing the beta on 2 machines for about a month.
Trust me I install XP on machines all the time without service pack 3 is it TERRIBLE!
Anyone who thinks they LOVE XP just for fun try installing it from SP0, worst XPerence ever!
Even with a XP SP3 CD there are still a load of updates…
Like Vista.
Love Win7.
:-P
07/05/2009 at 16:07 Doctor Doc says:
Probably, but I’ll wait 6 months or so for updated drivers, apps, games and windows-patches to fix things up.
I usually never learn this but it was not long ago Vista was released and I jumped on that so I still remember my lesson.
07/05/2009 at 16:44 Paul Moloney says:
Sounds cool; I have a partition ready to install this, and will probably use it for DX10 games. I’m tempted to completely re-install my laptop using Windows 7 too, since Vista really it a clunker running on it (and it’s a dual-core, 3GB mem XPS).
P.
07/05/2009 at 18:54 Starky says:
@gbarules2999
That is utter rubbish. RAM is volatile memory, which means it needs a constant voltage per stick to keep anything AT ALL in memory, full or not – And spending the past 15 mins googling my are off I can’t find any data to support your assertion that more RAM usage = more power consumption. And a couple that suggest otherwise ( http://www.anandtech.com/casecoolingpsus/showdoc.aspx?i=3413 – last paragraph)
Vague I know, but everything else mentions the increase consumption for adding extra sticks of RAM to a system, but nothing about energy usage based on RAM utilization – which leads me to conclude that if there is any, it’s negligible.
RAM uses a tiny amount of power, 3-5 watts per stick usually (for decent DDR SDRAM or newer) 10 maybe in high voltage older ram.
So RAM is always on and costs milliamps to switch out data…
Even if you were correct (and I’d happily stand corrected if you can provide a source) the difference between empty ram and fully loaded ram would be a few watts at best.
Insignificant in face of all the other power draws on a system.
And much, much, much less than the energy cost of accessing a hard drive.
I’d be willing to wager that ready boost saves more power than it consumes.
Hey if you can find any reliable source (anything with actual data) to suggest otherwise I’ll send you £10 via paypal.
P.S. I’d not install windows Vista on a laptop anyway, not unless it was a high level laptop with over 4GB of ram; which is a waste in laptops given the shortcomings of CPU and GPU power nothing short of maybe loading massive images into photoshop can utilize it. I’d stick with Linux for productivity, and XP for laptop gaming (as piss poor as that is for high end titles).
Vista 64 though is by far the best OS on the market for modern Desktop Gaming/Home Media PCs.
07/05/2009 at 19:02 jalf says:
@Starky: Yeah, you’re right. The RAM doesn’t care whether or not it is “used”. As long as the computer is turned on, the RAM is powered up. Whether or not it is “used” makes zero difference for power consumption (and in fact, Vista’s strategy may help reduce power consumption, by requiring fewer trips to the harddrive. Which means it can spin down more often, which *does* save power.
Which isn’t to say that Vista wasn’t “bloated”. It simply required more hardware to do the same things. It required more hardware than XP to be as responsive as XP. That’s not “optimized for the future” (because that implies that there was an advantage to it). It was simply inefficient. And if there was any doubt on that, note how much Win7 is able to improve memory consumption and resource usage over Vista. Not by completely rewriting the OS, but by tweaking and optmizing and keeping performance in mind.
Your claim that vista 64 is the best OS for gaming (or in general) baffles me though. I can’t see a single reason why you’d say that. It doesn’t really offer anything gaming-wise that you couldn’t get on XP. It doesn’t perform better, and it sometimes performs worse. Vista is, by now, adequate technically speaking. The bugs have been ironed out, the performance is back up to acceptable levels and so on. But that doesn’t make it *good*. Just not-bad. For gaming, I’d still rather use XP, or perhaps 64-bit XP.
07/05/2009 at 19:17 Starky says:
Jalf, that is true, but as I said, the vast majority of that was down to badly coded 3rd party drivers. Software that wasn’t optimized for Vista, and the addition of the pretty Aero interface – which on medium spec PCs in 2006 was an issue, I’ll grant.
It no longer is, and probably hasn’t been for a good year now.
Also combined with that that most hardware drivers are now decently optimized (not just the quick hackjobs vista got at launch), and SP1 solved most of the major issues that were actually Vista’s own.
Don’t get me wrong I’m not for a moment saying Vista’s Launch was perfect, no OS ever launches perfect, XP was horrid until SP1, and didn’t really become the awesome OS we all know and love until SP2, and the same would have been true (and probably will be) for Vista.
The vilification just goes well beyond the facts though. To the point where people just spew endless hate about it, usually uninformed idiotic hate at that.
As you say though, the improvements of Win7 are great, and I do like them myself – it’s well optimized and tweaked because it’s NOT a new OS, it’s just a rebranding of Vista with some interface improvements. Nothing that Microsoft could not have implemented in SP2 for Vista.
Still smart move for Microsoft really, they now basically get to sell a service pack as a brand new OS and rake in the cash, while also getting to dump the bad name of Vista.
07/05/2009 at 22:28 Brian says:
Benchmarks would be cool. Thanx in advance ;D
07/05/2009 at 22:36 Starky says:
Here you go follow this link
07/05/2009 at 22:50 gbarules2999 says:
@starky: You’re missing the point.
This is not a scale of bad and good and there is ONLY that scale. No, there is now a scale that looks like a cross, and on the top, there’s Linux/Mac, and on the bottom there’s XP. Most people have no opinion on the matter and simply don’t care – if they do, they don’t like it, because it’s fat and people don’t like fat.
Vista wasn’t bad or good, it just…wasn’t enough. No real upgrades to speak of (aside from DirectX 10 and pretty graphics). So most people stayed in XP, unless they bought a new computer.
I did run into many, many problems in my brief stint with Vista, and that was about a half a year ago. Just an anecdote; meaningless, of course, the grand scheme of things. But that doesn’t change the fact that I don’t like Vista. It annoyed me and I didn’t like using it.
The cache argument is still bogus, though. Vista’s bloat cannot be hidden inside of a cache mechanism (nice attempt at a diversion, though), which Linux and Mac has been using for years and has never had any problems running in under a GB of RAM (depending on the distro, with varying levels of bloat in there, just like in Windows).
I’d like to know where you got the notion that volatile memory is always turned on even when it’s not being used. The parts that are saving the data ARE, yes. that’s the definition of the thing.
But, yes, Vista is big. And it doesn’t have any real reason to upgrade. Mind telling me why I care? Oh, wait – I don’t. I don’t have a hate for Vista, I just don’t like it, with its annoying interface changes and bloated interior. When people ask what I think of Vista, I’m firmly in the Linux/Mac part of the cross mentioned above, with a trip down to XP for games once in a while. If Win7 continues to not piss me off, I may drop a few dollars to upgrade for prettier graphics. Until then, color me unconvinced.
07/05/2009 at 23:56 Starky says:
@gbarules, are you kidding no real upgrades? You obviously have no clue… now while I’m sure I’m coming over like a fanboy of Vista (which I’m not) give the OS it’s due it had a lot more new features than XP had.
Vast chunks of everything were rewritten from the ground up, which is part of the reason why Vista sucked so hard at launch, but why Win7 is going to be fantastic (all those brand new things are actually starting to work, and software devs have had vista long enough to be able to code for it).
Most impressive for me was the brand new, coded from the ground up audio stack. UAA and WASAPI – while vendors are dragging their feet supporting it, it’s going to be awesome. I also like that Microsoft stuck the fingers up at Creative and their crappy drivers, and crappy proprietary EAX, by flat out making it not work. Though it is kind of ironic of Microsoft breaking a monopoly like that.
Still, these awesome new features were half finished, or badly implemented.
And that I think was the biggest downfall of Vista, it was just too new, had too much new code – rather than step by step iterations of previous OS’s. It was too much for people to handle at once, and too ambitious to release for Microsoft. Also too much of it was under-the-hood stuff that average Joe could not grasp, all that they could show the average user is new pretty shinies, that would need a beefy machine to do justice anyway.
I’d wager that if MS had held a year long free public RC, and used that time to iron out all the issues that SP1 and soon SP2 solve, Vista would have been viewed as the best OS upgrade in the history of the company.
Which is a title I suspect Win7 may claim.
Though the lesson I learned from the Launch of Vista (A launch I personally DID NOT adopt, I did not move to Vista myself until SP1 was released), and I’m thinking MS did also given how they are handling the build up to release of Win7 – is that of all the people who are resistant to upgrading computers, Tech/IT professionals are by far the worst. They’ll do and say almost anything to avoid the added work – though with vista I don’t blame them, I recommended against upgrading to several companies I work with also – because it didn’t really offer anything for them, and the problems of a new OS are always to be avoided. I don’t think it was until 2003-4 that I started seeing most businesses moving to XP.
The only exceptions were companies I know do a lot of high grade CAD/3D/Image work and need massively beefy machines, and Vista was and is the best 64bit OS on the market.
Linux is great, I love it, but I’d never recommend it to friends and family, or to any company (because if they are asking for advice on if they should use Linux the answer is no).
As for Mac OS… I have to use it quite often (I work a lot in audio, art and design, the “forte” of the mac) and I can’t stand it. It lacks the freedom and complexity of Linux, yet isn’t even close to the universalism of Windows. I struggle to think of anything it does that Windows or Linux doesn’t do better. Still I’ll freely admit to being a Mac hater – mostly due to being forced to use them professionally.
Anyway, you clearly have no idea what you’re talking about if you think the cache argument is a diversion – google it on a few tech sites. Pretty much every one of the major tech sites (stupid little rantathon blogs aside) agree that the new philosophy of treating RAM as a cache rather than a resource to keep empty is a good one. One which Vista’s memory management does a good job of handling now that the majority of bugs are fixed.
And here’s why (numbers from 2006 so the gap is even wider now as memory has gotten much faster while HDDs have not (for the most part, SSD isn’t there yet).
DDR (PC2700) System memory is 37x faster than HDD access, CPU Level 2 cache is 82x faster, and CPU Level 1 cache is 283x faster.
So… It’s faster, uses less power (than reading it off the HDD), speeds up the system (less load time for commonly used apps), has zero impact on high priority programs needing more memory (like games)…
I’m Struggling to think of any downside to this way of handling memory over XPs “you have 2GB free sitting doing nothing”.
08/05/2009 at 06:49 nutterguy says:
@ ppl arguing with Starky,
Many game devs (EVE and Crytech devs in particular)and programmers (Photoshop Devs) have heaped praise upon Vistas memory management and Superfetch system.
Even Ubuntu is in the process of implementing a similar system afaik…
I was one of the early adopters, using Vista from Beta 1 (as I a now windows 7) and I had very few problems (Mainly related to Dells without &?%$! drivers) and no major problems.
As I said before going back to XP is now PAINFUL.
(PS I also despise anything apple related. MP3 player NOT iPod! Tards)
08/05/2009 at 16:38 kr8 says:
Why would you replace a perfectly (well…) functioning OS that game developers actually test for when designing their games for an RC-quality operating system that you most likely will stop getting security patches for about the time the final version hits?
If you just wanna try it out sure, but to run this as your main OS right now? For gaming? Pure folly.
10/05/2009 at 14:59 dsmart says:
There is seemingly no reason why anyone should still be running WINXP instead of Vista or Win7. Thats like holding on to your WIN31 diskettes in the face of WIN98SE.
Vista had a rocky launch for a bunch of reasons. Primary being MS flat out screwed the pooch by trying to coerce gamers into adopting it by hardwiring DX10 in it. Plus, most of it was a re-write and the OEMs and ISVs simply dragged their heels with software/hardware support. So when it was released and people found out that there were no drivers for the printer or similar hardware they bought back when Hoover was president, they freaked out.
If you’re still rocking WINXP Home | Pro, don’t be stupid. Go directly to WIN7 Pro, do not pass Go!, do not collect a darn thing.
All those synthetic benchmarks about WIN7 being slower for games (!) than WINXP and Vista etc are just that: synthetic. Apart from that the performance drop – if there is one – is negligible, given the current state of hardware components.
At the end of the day, WIN7 is going to have an easier time than Vista because Vista already took all the flak and going from XP to WIN7 is far less painful from all aspects of driver and software dev, than going from XP to Vista. So everyone has already caught up. Which is why WIN7 is so stable and already at RC1 and ready to rock.
13/05/2009 at 10:44 Marar says:
People forget that OS’s cost money, now, I’m happy with XP (very actually, have not formated since 2006, and it still handles well), does Vista/Win7 have anything that is needed for my regular use? (gaming, browsing, multimedia…-ing, maybe photo-editing), no? then why should I spend money on an upgrade I don’t need?
13/05/2009 at 20:31 Moe says:
Regarding Windows 7 being as fast as XP for gaming, I will tell you the following- I am running both Windows 7 and Windows XP. My systems specs are as follows:
Phenom 9850BE
4GB 1067 MhZ RAM
GTX 260 (OC’d to 649/1180)
780G mb
I ran DX9 for all my gaming, so I could test evenly. BTW- DX10 Runs slower for all the games I tested in Windows 7.
Farcry2 – Average 20% drop in FPS using Windows 7(Everything turned up to Ultra – but using only 2x Anti-aliasing)
Crysis- Same thing.
Crysis Warhead- Same thing.
See a pattern here?
All drivers completely updated. If I’m missing something, please let me know cause I do like Windows 7 for regular day to day. But I’m just gonna keep gaming on XP. But for the record, I’m really tired of looking at XP, and Windows 7 is SO COOL!