Anyone using Windows 7?

Greg King

I just kinda show up...
Staff member
I have been running this since returning from CES and so far, so good. To be perfectly fair though, I reinstalled Vista 64 Ultimate over a month ago and not had one single issue with it. Vista is a great OS now but its too bad that patch after patch needed to be applied to get it to where its at.

I have 7 installed on another machine and have been remoting into it to deal with the new OS and everything is running perfectly. I am working on installing it on a virtual machine sometime tomorrow and see how it runs in that environment as well. Hell, I am posting this message within Windows 7.

Anyone else have any input on this?
 

Rob Williams

Editor-in-Chief
Staff member
Moderator
I've heard great things about Windows 7, and it's kind of refreshing. The Windows Vista launch was muddied with doubts, and as we found out, it was mostly for good reason. Since the serious bugs have been worked out since then, and 7 is based on Vista, but trimmed down, I don't see much reason for not getting excited.

I'll give it a go in the next few weeks, and perhaps write up an article comparing performance.
 

Greg King

I just kinda show up...
Staff member
See, that's the problem with public opinion. Vista is a very stable OS now and while issues remain, there are plenty of problems with XP as well. In the age of instant communication, Vista didn't stand a chance. We saw similar issues with XP concerning driver support but not everyone had access to the tubes like they do now. It's easy to go bitch about something when you can post to a site from your phone... 100% connected 24/7.

That said, Vista was a DOG when it came out and the fault of that lays squarely at the feet of Microsoft. They can't afford to botch 7 this time around and I am sure that they wont. They can't afford to have a tidal wave of negative press from the start. Vista has never recovered from everything they rightfully received for the first year or so it was out, regardless of the level of quality that its at now. While not perfect, its damned good and I see little excuse for anyone to complain about the OS now.
 

Rob Williams

Editor-in-Chief
Staff member
Moderator
It wasn't until Service Pack 1 came out that I began to actually enjoy using Vista. Until that time, I outright hated it, as I expressed multiple times in our content and these forums. SP1 fixed a lot, and while bugs (and hitches) still remain, I'd still much rather choose Vista over XP, it goes without saying. Windows 7 should take what we like about Vista now, and just make it better. More refined UI, a smoother launch and prettier face... it should work out well. Microsoft is taking a chance on anything this time around, it seems.
 

Merlin

The Tech Wizard
tried to download the beta, get to the downoad page, then goes back to the previuos page for some reason, maybe busy?
 

Kougar

Techgage Staff
Staff member
See, that's the problem with public opinion. Vista is a very stable OS now and while issues remain, there are plenty of problems with XP as well. In the age of instant communication, Vista didn't stand a chance. We saw similar issues with XP concerning driver support but not everyone had access to the tubes like they do now. It's easy to go bitch about something when you can post to a site from your phone... 100% connected 24/7.

That said, Vista was a DOG when it came out and the fault of that lays squarely at the feet of Microsoft. They can't afford to botch 7 this time around and I am sure that they wont. They can't afford to have a tidal wave of negative press from the start. Vista has never recovered from everything they rightfully received for the first year or so it was out, regardless of the level of quality that its at now. While not perfect, its damned good and I see little excuse for anyone to complain about the OS now.

Eh, screw public opinion. :) My strong dislike of the OS was well earned by the OS itself. I've had more issues with Vista than I did with XP (although that is partly because I didn't migrate to XP until SP1 was released for it). The more I use Vista the more tarnished I think it is, which is saying something because I thought it was great and ran well during the two betas and first two RC builds.

I have given up trying to solve it, but either Vista or Seagate is to blame for the occasional bits of corrupted data that get written to any kind of RAID array I attempt to use. For a long time Vista did have it's own issues with Intel RAID solutions, and that was well documented at least and solved with the more recent Intel RAID driver releases... That was one problem the Vista beta's never had either, because only the RTM build contained the change to the HDD power configuration settings that broke things in the first place.

Anyway (just as with Vista) I think the Windows 7 beta is excellent. The OS X-esque taskbar is a great idea that was poorly implemented, but it is fixable. Just renable the Quicklaunch bar to hold all shortcuts, and add button text or disable grouping as desired for the taskbar itself. Which leaves the user still unable to right-click the buttons to reach a context menu, but I can live without it. The rest of the changes are just a huge dosage of common sense that Vista never had.

So far I've not had folders randomly changing view-types or how contents are arranged, and all of my media has played without the need for any codec packs. Left 4 Dead still crashes, but it does that in Vista anyway.

The only thing Windows 7 couldn't instal drivers for "out-of-the-box" was my Xonar DX, and if you attempt to use the device manager -> update device drivers solution by pointing it to the drivers folder, then you will get a system-service-exception portcls.sys blue screen several minutes after installation appears to complete. However, if you extract the drivers and browse to the subfolder (bypassing the setup.exe in the root directory) and use the secondary setup.exe (It skips the power connector warning, amongst other things) then it will work fine and the Xonar will be fully functional.
 
Last edited:

Merlin

The Tech Wizard
I just tested it... downloaded fine for me. You might just want to try again.
Might be an ActiveX problem, I did click to open activeX for the download the first time, nothing happened so I tried and again and took me back to the Key number page ( and different number too )
 

Merlin

The Tech Wizard
Might be an ActiveX problem, I did click to open activeX for the download the first time, nothing happened so I tried and again and took me back to the Key number page ( and different number too )
Got IT
Very simular to vista, loaded fast. Now I'll see about the drivers

Merlin
 

Kougar

Techgage Staff
Staff member
Is anyone here having problems sending feedback to MS? Every time I try to send feedback it refuses to authenticate my Live ID as having the privilege to use their MS Connect service.

I'm finding it sort of ironic, since I use the same Live ID as my Technet Plus account, which is what I used to download the beta & key in the first place.

So far the Photoshop CS4 trial and ebay Turbolister crash during the initial install attempts, but everything else seems to work well. Looks like a problem related to the updated windows installer they're trying to use.

Edit: Nevermind, seems they goofed up that small detail for TechNet/Subscriber users... http://timheuer.com/blog/archive/2009/01/12/give-feedback-for-windows-7.aspx
 
Last edited:

b1lk1

Tech Monkey
Nice to hear that this may be a decent release. I refuse to be a beta tester myself though. Doubt I will switch from Vista as well unless I can just upgrade my current install of Vista.
 

Merlin

The Tech Wizard
Loaded Windows 7 and it messed up my activation on Vista 64 bit, I loaded it on another drive, SO I had to reactivate and explain what happened since I use OEM OS.
All back to normal
WIn7 has a different look from Vista, but I think the same activities and look can be duplicated with Vista
So my assumption would be just a slight change from Vista Ultimate
 

Kougar

Techgage Staff
Staff member
Considering that an upgrade of XP to Vista, even on clean systems, often resulted in a driver morass, random behavior, and huge performance penalties from stacked/redundant drivers impeding each other, I doubt an upgrade to W7 would be any better. They would need to completely change how the OS compartmentalizes its drivers and such to ever guarantee a standard, good upgrading experience. At least that's my opinion at any rate.


Merlin, W7 should not have messed up your windows activiation. Vista tends to mess that up on its own without help. I installed Wndows 7 on the same system as my Vista x64 install and have had no activation problems with either one.

Vista can't duplicate how light W7 is... it feels just as responsive on a single drive as Vista did on a RAID 10 array. In fact Windows 7 boots faster than Vista despite Vista using a RAID 10 array! That might be because Windows 7 boots with 41 processes running (as I have configured), that's almost XP territory. With the same programs I have loaded right now, Vista boots with 72 processes running.
 

b1lk1

Tech Monkey
Again, I have no issues with responsiveness or speed in Vista here. Besides that, Windows 7 is based on Vista and most likely could be used to make a good upgrade install for Vista. I have 80+ processes running at any given time and programs still respond nearly instantaneously to my mouse clicks.
 

Rob Williams

Editor-in-Chief
Staff member
Moderator
I still haven't been able to give this a try, but it is downloaded and burned, ready to go. I've been swamped, so I hope to be able to test things out a little bit next week... if I can manage to catch up.

Kougar, what other than failed RAID setups don't you like about Vista? It seems to me that the RAID issues is what's turning you off of the OS. I haven't had any serious gripe with Vista for a while, but I admit I only use it for benchmarking, and only benchmarking. So, if I were to use it as a regular OS, I'd probably find more to complain about, but that goes with any OS.

Merlin, it's a little odd that installing Windows 7 would screw up your Vista activation... did you originally install it to the exact same partition or something?

b1lk1 said:
Again, I have no issues with responsiveness or speed in Vista here.

That doesn't mean it shouldn't be refined and made even faster ;-)
 

Merlin

The Tech Wizard
Merlin, it's a little odd that installing Windows 7 would screw up your Vista activation... did you originally install it to the exact same partition or something?


ALso when booting, my USB keyboard not would work. So, I reset the Bios, then it worked.
I can't explain about the activation, but the guys at Microsoft maybe new of some issues with a dual boot of Win7 and OEM Vista
I did put the WIN7 on another drive, seperate of Vista Ultimate, but same machine. Maybe something to do with OEM operating systems seeing somethng else and deactivated.
All is good now

Merlin
 

Kougar

Techgage Staff
Staff member
Kougar, what other than failed RAID setups don't you like about Vista? It seems to me that the RAID issues is what's turning you off of the OS. I haven't had any serious gripe with Vista for a while, but I admit I only use it for benchmarking, and only benchmarking. So, if I were to use it as a regular OS, I'd probably find more to complain about, but that goes with any OS.

The RAID problems were just the showstoppers. This is only some of the RAID problems Vista had Link, and was only a small part of the RAID issues I ran into. In fact I am no longer sure if it isn't the drives... I am not willing to install XP in a RAID 10 setup to figure out if it is the OS or the Seagate drives to blame as that would wipe out my Vista install (in regards to the ongoing data corruption issues).

Rob, I tend to sound off against Vista plenty on these forums, so I made a point to never actually start a full out rant. But since you ask... :D I'll mention a few. Way over a year ago I had written several pages of complaints and a list of problems in a very lengthy Vista rant to a word file, but I eventually deleted it. I don't fully hate Vista, it does have plenty of advantages over XP which contributed to why I upgraded to it in the first place. But the best descriptive I can come up with that properly describes my two years experience with the OS, is that it was half-assed.

What kind of OS randomly changes folder view settings? Or how files and folders are arranged? I can change the folder back to how I prefer my folders to be viewed and sorted, close it, then reopen it and most of the time it changed again! Not just folder views, but how folder contents are sorted as well. Using the Folders option to set ALL folders to the same setting doesn't do anything either. Both folder view and the arrangement of folder contents are still randomly changed, its never been fixed although MS acknowledges the problem exists.

What kind of OS decides upon a random restart (out-of-the-blue) to tell you the install is no longer valid and must be registered online again? Nothing had changed, no new drivers were installed, the BIOS was not touched. Yet just a single reboot later I need to reactivate my OS to regain its lost functionality. This has occured three times that I still remember. Sometimes another reboot later Vista will automatically go back to normal without the need to reactivate as if it never happened.

There was a subset rant to this in regards to the Microsoft Licensing Service failing to autostart. This bug was eventually fixed somewhere around six months after launch... basically when their licensing service fails to autostart the entire OS locks down and nothing works because it can't authenticate itself. No messages are displayed to notify the user, not a single message of any kind. The Control Panel will refuse to open, Administrative Tools is for all intents and purposes locked out, any kind of control menu, the personalization menu, right-clicking My Computer -> properties, everything is disabled and you are left using a crippled desktop and wondering if something just hacked or infected your OS to lock you out of your own computer. Every tool or menu or informative panel you need to troubleshoot what is going on was disabled, but doesn't actually tell you it was disabled. Instead they just decline to open.

Then there is the "bloat". Vista does have bloat. A fully updated Vista is much closer to XP now I will freely admit, but it still isn't as quick to respond as XP nor as fluid... and it was god awful before SP1. Browsing directories, waiting for folder views to refresh, simple navigation around the user interface, all of those took longer or suffered from lag as they updated. And then there were the file transfers... MS forgot that old cliche "If it ain't broke, then don't fix it". Well, file transfers weren't broke in XP but they sure fixed it all right. Last I have seen it still doesn't equal (or beat) XP even after they rewrote entire batches of code and disabled their "improved" methods of file transfering to better mimic how XP transfers a file. I frankly had no idea a simple file transfer could become so convoluted and take a hill of protocols and mountain of code, but they pulled it off. Yet XP was still better, and they did the best they could removing the protocols and code Vista started with in order to make it emulate how XP transfers a file. Back to the "bloat", there are more processes running amok yet they aren't spendthrifty when it comes to sucking down RAM or virtual RAM. I don't have any fancy numbers to quote anymore, but Windows 7 seems to proove that did not have to be the case. MS simply declined to optimize, polish, and generally tune Vista instead.

Then there is the disk thrashing... for the first year when a forum goer would post about all the constant, unending hard drive activity I told concerned or worried users it was normal and was more than likely caused by the windows indexing/search service. Well oops, that's incorrect. Thanks to the Sysinternals ProcessMon utility, I now know what is bombarding my disk with write commands, and it almost never was the search indexing service. Instead it was the MS licensing component. I do not remember the exact process name and should have taken a screenshot for reference, next time I am using Vista and notice it occuring I'll do so. However the disk thrashing would occur upon boot, and would not cease until the system was fully restarted. What was causing it was some part of the Microsoft licensing component package, constantly issueing the following commands (read, cache, delete, write, read)... and repeating in a loop. It was reading, writing, then deleting the same 2-3 cached files repeatedly in an intermittent loop. Of course it took far <1% CPU usage to do this, so any scan of the task manager would show nothing amiss with the system process running the commands. I have a fully updated Vista x64 install and it still occurs... and all four Seagate drives are buzzing away at full volume whenever it occurs.

I'm sorry, but I used an overclocked Pentium 4 system with the same install of XP for not quite three years, and I never had the frustrations I had with Vista regardless of if I left the system at stock or not. Yet because of the RAID corruption issues I've had to reinstall three times, not counting when I changed from an OEM Ultimate x32 to a retail Ultimate x64 install. And still my experience with Vista never really improved. Things were so bad I set the entire system to 100% stock, even removing factory overclocks where applicable and installed a fresh install of Vista, yet the same problems continue to plague my installs. Over the past two years the only thing I've not changed hardware-wise was probably the Q6600.

Writing this up just got me genuinely frustrated again, so now you see why I deleted that Word doc file that contained a few pages of rants and evidence backing up my frustrations with Vista. I'd love to say Vista is analogous to the infamous "lipstick on a pig" metaphor, ie it's pretty and dressed up but it's still a pig... but that would be an untrue oversimplification of the problem and just me venting. Mostly.

Vista has its advantages over XP, but they pale in comparison to the disadvantages and general step back in most other regards. I've not even given the Vista SP2 beta a glance, because I don't think it can be fixed with even a service pack. I'm just happy Windows 7 has all the positives of Vista without most of the negatives... its an OS that rivals XP in terms of performance with all the benefits Vista had to offer, and it is just a beta. Of course I thought the Vista betas and both Vista Release Candidates were great too, and perhaps you can get a glimpse now of how well that turned out for me.
 
Last edited:

Rob Williams

Editor-in-Chief
Staff member
Moderator
Haha. Give a man a few words, get back a thousand :-D

Kougar said:
Rob, I tend to sound off against Vista plenty on these forums, so I made a point to never actually start a full out rant.

To be fair, I was one of the worst ranters in Vista's earliest days, so I can understand the frustration. People used to claim that I straight-out hated Microsoft and that my complaints about the OS weren't valid (I know this because of the slew of e-mails I received after I posted my Vista rant article). That aside...

Kougar said:
What kind of OS randomly changes folder view settings?

I'm kind of glad you bring this point up, because that also annoys the hell out of me. I don't have that exact issue, but what one I do have is that Vista will automatically remove custom sort-by options at the top of a folder (such as 'Type'). I never really thought much of it though, and figured it was just me experiencing the issue.

Kougar said:
Of course it took far <1% CPU usage to do this, so any scan of the task manager would show nothing amiss with the system process running the commands. I have a fully updated Vista x64 install and it still occurs... and all four Seagate drives are buzzing away at full volume whenever it occurs.

Now that is odd. I recall hearing about the issue before, but I figured it was ironed out. I haven't run into that issue personally, but that would be a huge pain, especially with that many drives. If you do find out the service in the future, let me know if you remember to look at it.

Kougar said:
I'd love to say Vista is analogous to the infamous "lipstick on a pig" metaphor, ie it's pretty and dressed up but it's still a pig... but that would be an untrue oversimplification of the problem and just me venting.

I won't disagree, but I still have to admit that I haven't had a real issue in a while, although there are many small things that I just let slide... minor annoyances (like how it takes five seconds to load up the menu when you right-click the networking icon in the systray). Vista is undoubtedly prettier than XP, but sadly, I think you've run into far more issues than the common man. That used to be me back when Vista first came out and for the first year, but ever since SP1 came out, the hatred faded a great deal.

For the sake of all that is humane, I hope that Windows 7 works out a lot better for you than Vista did ;-)
 
Top