General Computer DiscussionYou should use this section to discuss software topics including Windows, Linux and various software applications, together with hardware related topics including buying a new machine, graphics cards, keyboards, etc.
Windows RC1 has arrived,
from testing the earlier versions i have found it to be
sleeker, and a lot less resource consuming than Vista, plus
all the Vista annoyances have been dispensed with, a lot of the 'hard wired'
security warnings are now customisable, and win7 supports touch screen
and an array of other sensory hardware,
Apparently RC1 has 'windowsXP' mode, in the hope of prising
sales from upgradaphobes, as well as assuring compatibility.
I haven't installed RC1 yet but I'll be posting further once I have.
got it running here now, they've tweaked performance a lot, the blue circle hardly ever shows it's face, which is a vista annoyance, control panel opens instantly, no torch icon
while the icons slowly load, I have all the animations, sliders etc on full
with no detriment to the system, swapfile thrashing stays to a minimum
with windows opening up first of all, no waiting around,
there are minor hiccups, but they are quite minor, and will no doubt be ironed out
by user exposure and feedback,
l'm looking forward to getting a copy whe this RC1 terminates, and that's a first for me.
I'm wondering how long I can last on XP, hopefully till windows 10 or something, or until Microsoft finally realize that the public arnt going to keep funding them for basically reworking old rope and competition opens up.
I'm wondering how long I can last on XP, hopefully till windows 10 or something, or until Microsoft finally realize that the public arnt going to keep funding them for basically reworking old rope and competition opens up.
how sad, win7 is nothing like XP, there's lots of new tools and advances that make it
more interesting and easy to use, to me anyway.
I'm wondering how long I can last on XP, hopefully till windows 10 or something, or until Microsoft finally realize that the public arnt going to keep funding them for basically reworking old rope and competition opens up.
Same PC... Win7 vs XP is no contest,
7 boots faster, runs faster.... totally no competition.
7 boots faster, runs faster.... totally no competition.
I'm not actually arguing with that but that kind of begs the question why the heck did they make XP so slow to boot in the first place ?
why don't they make XP faster ? well thats obvious they need to get their hands on your money !
I bet windows 3.11 boots like a supercharged tornado these days.
therefore they are probably still holding back on performance so they can still keep bringing out improved versions. presumably by version 10 they will have come to the end of this.
Ive spent absolutely ages in the past messing about with one operating system after another never really being happy with it, all sorts of tweaks etc, however XP at least lets me do just about anything I need without to much hassle, and even on my 5 yr old PC, I definitely do not feel I need to spend any more time messing about with it because i don't see any real gain. I was forced to go from nt4/win2k to XP because Microsoft changed the drivers so they were incompatible and so new devices required it. hopefully XP is is so widespread any new device manufacturer would not consider not supporting it.
my PC gets rebooted once every few months, and the operating system itself does not actually consume any CPU power so any difference in speed is probably just the stupid gimmicky stuff that Ive probably got turned off anyway.
the applications I use/make are limited in speed by processing power, the OS has little impact on this :- the underlying windows primitives that do windows messaging like WinAPI::sendMessageEx are probably much the same they have been since windows 3.11 anything else that actually slows down applications i consider to be more to do with add ons rather than the operating system, for example .net is incredibly slow but it is powerful, yet at the end of the day it does things by making calls to things like sendMessageEx.
directx is another matter however, they change it each time and usually make things better but also worse and taking out functions and stuff that you've used is annoying.
if new windows can boot on my current PC in less than 1 second from being turned on then il be impressed. but until then i cba as anything over 1 second is still too long and i would still leave my PC on all the time.
another irritating thing is that they are dummying things down , taking away things that the average user cant understand yet that just makes it far more difficult to do them and even more risky.
oh and it needs to be fully 32bit and 64 bit compatible fort me to be interested too, and come with sp1 and sp2 already included on the CD installation disc's. oh and not to mention proper monitor refresh rate control, none of this limited choice of 60hz or 70hz etc junk.
oh and it needs to be fully 32bit and 64 bit compatible fort me to be interested too, and come with sp1 and sp2 already included on the CD installation disc's. oh and not to mention proper monitor refresh rate control, none of this limited choice of 60hz or 70hz etc junk.
I'm running the 64 bit candidate, and it's perfectly fine, it's fully 32 bit backwards compatible
you even get 32 and 64 bit Internet explorer, I've had no problems getting drivers as all the Vista 64 drivers work fine, directx 10 graphics are nice, as of yet, there are no visible annoyances or glitches to warrant a service pack, although cumulative security updates are
inevitable, ...why would you want service packs that haven't been made yet anyway? xD
all the latest display drivers afaik have a refresh rate override anyway, either in the box or as a seperate d/load,
why would you want anything besides your default tft settings?
why would I even want a TFT ? ok so it would mean I have about another 4 sq ft of desk space.
its encouraging that you say its fully 32 bit backward compatible, however winxp64 bit was supposed to be able to run 32 bit apps, and indeed it can run some, but i have found I need to modify some .net apps to run on winxp64 that run perfectly on both win XP 32 and even vista 32 bit.
vista was supposed to not need service packs either. we all know win7 will need them and wont be fully stable and secure to start with, its just far too annoying when you buy it and it doesn't come with the latest upgrades and and you have to spend time upgrading, or messing about slipstreaming an installation CD.
like i said i want more of a choice than the pathetic 60hz/70hz refresh rate override that comes with windows/ati drivers. although i can override the refresh rate more accurately however this only overrides the gfx card chip timings, windows or more accurately directx cant cope with the non standard timings and so vsync doesn't work acceptably.
why would I even want a TFT ? ok so it would mean I have about another 4 sq ft of desk space.
its encouraging that you say its fully 32 bit backward compatible, however winxp64 bit was supposed to be able to run 32 bit apps, and indeed it can run some, but i have found I need to modify some .net apps to run on winxp64 that run perfectly on both win XP 32 and even vista 32 bit.
vista was supposed to not need service packs either. we all know win7 will need them and wont be fully stable and secure to start with, its just far too annoying when you buy it and it doesn't come with the latest upgrades and and you have to spend time upgrading, or messing about slipstreaming an installation CD.
like i said i want more of a choice than the pathetic 60hz/70hz refresh rate override that comes with windows/ati drivers. although i can override the refresh rate more accurately however this only overrides the gfx card chip timings, windows or more accurately directx cant cope with the non standard timings and so vsync doesn't work acceptably.
I assure you mate, Win7 is very very stable, I haven't been able to make it crash yet, despite being very silly running allsorts of new and old apps,
Windows update provides you with security updates automatically, it now has it's own applet and doesn't need a browser, and gives the user close control over it's functionality,
I couldn't use a CRT monitor, being bombarded with all that EM radiation? yucky,
I think we're on .NET 4 nowor something, so I think there's a lot better compatibility,
everyone knows XP64 was poo and failed badly, but a lot work has been done
to improve it across Vista and now with win7 it appears sorted,
anyway, I think i'll give up trying to convince you seeing as though you are a clear upgradeaphobe
lol, I'l upgrade when I think its worth it, I'm not a phobe :p but It just seems like a lot of hassle, which means I'm not someone who has to have the latest just for the sake of it.
my winxp hasn't crashed much in many years, except to day when I learned about the infamous ati black screen of death lolz. that seems to be purely ati related, probably old drivers not cleaned out totally.
i use .net 3.5 although i try and keep it 2.0 compatible as thats usually comes standard with winxp. and the difference in install size is phenomenal.
it is actually a very simple fix to get .net apps to run on xp64 when there are only 32 bit versions of some specific library such as managed directx.
today I also discovered a bug in Microsoft c#.
don't forget I started with the likes of win3.11 thinking that was a a much better thing than the many things before, so by comparison what we have now is certainly a lot better, i do miss the old progman.exe though :s
actually if you count up all the versions this windows 7 is probably about version 10. there were several diverging versions which probably havnt been included. i think msdos got to about 7 before it faded out.
I wonder will be the next big thing ? "doors" instead of windows ?
and oh btw so how long does it take to boot compared to xp ? and i dont mean with a fresh install I mean after all the updates and all the features that comes with it plus after loading tons of mega apps devices and services etc,,,
and have they fixed the explorer bug yet ? the one that hangs it when you open a folder with a corupted video file with thumbnails view and you end up losing your tray icons when it restarts. although i havnt noticed it latly maybe they have already
oh and the other thing I would like to insist on is updates that never require a full reboot wether for applications or all but the core os parts, preferably not even video drivers although thats probably reaching for the moon.
Last edited by meow; 10-05-2009 at 00:54..
Reason: bored
lol quite good
but again my question is why hasn't this been standard ever since win3.11?
however you don't need to upgrade the whole os, just explorer which there are many much better versions. i haven't actually got round to finding a good one yet.
one thing that makes me reluctant to upgrade is setting up all the applications, and everything, i think the next time i need to do a complete reinstall of OS i might well consider upgrading.
however this only happens when i end up with a ntfs partition corrupted so badly its unusable, which although isn't supposed to happen with ntfs has happened twice in the last 15 years or so, yet the disks are 100% perfect on an extended read write test.
my PC is 5 yrs old too, time for upgrade too, but not seen anything yet which seems really worth it.
Windows 7 release candidate is here
Linear Mode
