Just got 7000 installed yesterday, and its pretty nice. Besides advanced
features that they intend to put in the final version, the OS is pretty much
bug free. The main problems that I've had with it so far are compatibility
with programs that want to launch at startup via a registry key. For right
now, I'm just putting them in the startup folder (like RefreshLock).
The main problem is IE8. It has alot of nice features that integrate with
features in windows 7, but its buggy as hell. When you can't render a text
box (ie gmail, pretty much any forum, etc) correctly, then you suck.
Sure, there's a nifty compatibility-mode button that I can press to fix it,
but its annoying as hell. The worst website to use is tinypic....it takes alot
of skill to hit the browse button and have it register
I'd love to try out
the newest firefox 3.1 nightly release, but im too lazy. Compatibility mode
will just have to be on until they fix some of this.
Steam works pretty good on it. Just played a round and had no issues.
I've heard that others were having issues with it crashing out of the game
after a few hours of playing, but I also heard that it was fixed in a small
patch about a month ago.
Windows Firewall is very very silent now. It never asks you about
anything, or for anything, unless there's a problem. Windows Defender,
sadly enough, is integrated...I'd much rather use something else.
UAC, the one main thing everyone hated with vista, is still present, but its
quite easy to turn off or to make it nag you less. Mine nags on a newly
downloaded file being run, or when a program tries to modify certain
areas of the registry.
If you're gonna reformat soon anyways, or if you're like me and reformat
every 3 months or so just for the hell of it, I'd grab a torrent of 7000
(leaked yesterday, officially released as a public beta on the 6th). If you
can deal with IE8 having a few quirks, or if you're gonna install firefox
right away, go for it.
I'm running W7 on a 2.2 single-core AMD, with 1gb pc3200 ram and a
nvidia 8600GTS. Ram consumption floats between 50% and 70%
depending on what you're doing with aero enabled, and default cpu usage
with nothing happening and Aero running is around 2%. Startup time was
about 35 seconds, which in my experiences is way better than vista. The
OS would definitely run even faster with 2gb of ram and a better processor.
I downloaded and used vista drivers for my chipset, video card, and
sound card, and everything worked just fine. If you have a Creative card,
I'd suggest googling around for daniel_k's last set of vista drivers...they
work really well (i got mine via torrent...you only need the 60mb exe, not the CD iso).
If you'd like me to test out any program compatibility before you use it,
I'd be more than willing to try...(hint: alot of programs that were broken
in vista will work in W7).I think you can consider the OS much like the relationship between
Windows 2000 and XP. XP sorta fixed most of 2000's flaws and made it
sexier, and Microsoft would allow you to upgrade from 2000 to XP for
pretty cheap. Its all the same with Vista and W7, so yes, I can safely say
that it will become very popular when it is released, much like XP was.
