Windows 7 Ultimate review

Discussion in 'Technical' started by Conagher, Oct 10, 2009.


  1. Conagher

    Conagher Dark Custom Rider Moderator Emeritus Founding Member

    I loaded a fresh install of Windows 7 Ultimate RTM Retail Version on my XPS M1710 laptop this evening.

    I had run the Windows 7 RC version on a spare Sata hard drive this last spring for testing, but I went back to my XP MCE until the final version of Windows 7 came out. I enjoy the visual enhancements very much, and a fresh install of an OS makes any system faster....:D
     
  2. RightHand

    RightHand Been There, Done That RIP 4/15/21 Moderator Moderator Emeritus Founding Member

    Re: Windows 7 Ultimate

    Thanks for the info C. Aside from the visual enhancements, are the functional improvements worth the upgrade?
     
  3. ghrit

    ghrit Bad company Administrator Founding Member

    Re: Windows 7 Ultimate

    I have a Toshiba Satellite factory refurb laptop on order that will come with Vista loaded and a free upgrade to W7. Had it not been so, it would be XP for me. Zero problems with XP since day one, and if I don't like 7, XP pro will be installed clean on a formatted hard drive. I have seen good reviews on 7, even Scot Finney changed his mind about it after the last beta, and he went dark side (went Mac) a year or so back.

    And I echo RH's question about functionality, XP had all I'll ever need (well, so did W95, but it was so unstable as to be almost unusable. Regarding stability, W3.1 was better, IIRC. I still miss ProgMan.)

    Somehow, water managed to find its way inside of the 5 year old mega slow Brick portable, and it wasn't too happy with the bath --
     
  4. magnus392

    magnus392 Field Marshall Mags Moderator Emeritus Founding Member

    Re: Windows 7 Ultimate

    The thing about W7 is that the Ultimate and Business versions come with an XPM (XP module) to create a virtual XP environment to alleviate the problems everyone had with Vista not working with anything.

    So it is basically Vista with a new paint job and an XP based glove box.

    I'll pass, I'll stick with Leopard and get Snow Leopard when I get the scratch.
     
  5. Conagher

    Conagher Dark Custom Rider Moderator Emeritus Founding Member

    Re: Windows 7 Ultimate

    Functionality is awesome compared to Vista. I feel that Windows 7 is what Vista should've been. It starts up and loads faster than XP MCE that my laptop came with from Dell. It is very stable and it had almost all the drivers needed for my laptop built in. I only had to load video, sound card, and NIC drivers to finish the fresh install on a formatted partition.
     
  6. Byte

    Byte Monkey+++

    Re: Windows 7 Ultimate

    I chopped my XP partition in half on my music PC to try a Win7 install...well let's just say I got exactly what I expected... A broken and unrecoverable XP install and a failed Win7 install! Good thing I backed everything up that I wanted to keep. Of course, I did forget to pull my music drive before starting. Win7 put itself on the eide music drive...good thing I didn't let it format on it's own (I pre formatted the partition on the raid where I intended to install it). Anyway, it seemed to see the partitions on the raid fine...after reboot it was hosed. Pulled the music drive to make sure it was OK. Put it in another PC and that's when I found that Windows 7 put its hidden boot dir and windows dir on the music disk *%^&*&^#^*&!

    Turns out the installer didn't actually support the old SI SATA raid controller on my old nForce2 MB! Luckily, it just took wiping the raid clean, breaking it back down to 2 discrete disks and shutting the raid controller off in BIOS. No benefit of the striped 10k rpm raptors but so far I like the OS itself. I'm sure there'll be a working raid driver sometime in the future.

    Oh and the music drive...was a major PItA gettin ownership of the files switched over to the new installation's admin account! Glad I didn't have to re-rip all 118gigs worth of music again...might be worht the $100 to buy another drive and have a full back-up!

    Just thought I'd share the story of my first Win7 install with you all!

    Byte

    Oh PS! Concerning load times. The box it's on is an AMD 2800+ Barton w/ 2gig Patriot 800Hz DDR2, nForce2 chipset, nVidia 6800 GT, 72gig 10k rpm Raptor HDD and it boots about 8 seconds faster than my m1730 which has a Core2 Extreme X7900 @ 3 GHz w/ 4gig ram, dual 8700M GT SLi, and 380gig RAID 0 (dual 7200 rpm 180's). So basically it boots on 8yr old tech about as fast as it does on last years tricked out m1730! What a pisser!
     
  7. Al Bundy

    Al Bundy Monkey++

    Re: Windows 7 Ultimate

    Well Byte, that's just to much work. Slip the drivers into a install cd via nlite. Boot into recovery console and give the commands fixmbr, fixboot.
     
  8. Byte

    Byte Monkey+++

    Re: Windows 7 Ultimate

    I tried 6 different ways to restore the MBR...no go.

    Byte
     
  9. Al Bundy

    Al Bundy Monkey++

    Re: Windows 7 Ultimate

    You have to install the drivers in a win install cd first. No drivers=no find HD.
     
  10. Byte

    Byte Monkey+++

    Re: Windows 7 Ultimate

    I can't rem installing a driver for this raid controller under XP...pretty sure I just installed directly to the raid from a clean install of XP. I'll know for sure come March when Win7 expires and I have to revert back to XP on that box. When I boot with an XP install disk I could see the raid drive and was able to set up partitions and format them. Dunno why Win7 wouldn't handle it unless it's considered legacy (an nForce2 MB) and its drivers are removed from the Win7 base driver library. :shrug: I should know more in March! For now I am just too happy to have my music back!

    Byte
     
  11. Al Bundy

    Al Bundy Monkey++

    Re: Windows 7 Ultimate

    I had to slip my drivers(nforce) into the cd in order to install x64. Easy enough to do, grab a copy of nlite trial and create the disk.
     
  12. jamesmartyn

    jamesmartyn Guest

    Re: Windows 7 Ultimate

    I like windows 7 and It is really good operating systems. It is better than previous all operating systems of Microsoft. I like the most feature of windows 7 is touchscreen. It is amazing feature. It is saving our time.It is faster than windows XP and windows Vista. It is also supporting the ext2/ext3. Windows vista is failure operating systems.
     
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