Windows 7 Public Beta

I installed it on a Toshiba G15R-AV501. After some initial hiccups with the graphics card (GeForce Go 6600), it's running well.

Specs:

Intel Centrino 1.8 GHz (effective P4 rating: 2.26 GHz)

GeForce Go 6600

Hitachi Travelstar 60GB 7200RPM

Samsung Spinpoint M 160 5400RPM

A few annoyances:

Had to raid Toshiba's support site for drivers for Vista. XP drivers don't play nice with 7.

Video card refused to run Aero (despite supporting it) until I let 7 download drivers.

HD rates as 2.1 (It's a IDE drive so that might have something to with it)

SD card reader not recognized until I installed a driver from a Tecra notebook. Despite newer Qosmio's there aren't any compatible drivers with older Qosmios. Go Figure :-/

I'm impressed with how well its running with 4 year old hardware. The startbar is taking a bit of getting used to, but if you unpin (IE, Documents, and WMP) it's just like the old start bar you know and love.

Will definitely continue playing with it as time permits over the next few months.

#522000

I've got a SATA (?) drive (Whatever happens to be on a ThinkPad T61), and my hard drive was rated as 2.1. Anyways, I found a solution on the Lenovo forums - trying disabling write cache: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/259716

I don't know if it's actually safe to do this, but it fixed it.

#522090

My little brother has been using 7 since a few months ago (that thing called pre-beta?) and he fell in love with it he even persuaded me to do the same thing. He had this new thing installed yesterday. I've tried it for a few hours, installing programs I have to use for work and they run pretty fine.

Smiles:

- Boots up a lot quicker than Vista (or maybe because it's still newly, clean installed).

- The new taskbar is a bit too big for me but you get a couple of new functions in return such as windows media player mini-buttons (you can pause, play or get to the next/previous song without having to pull up the main program window).

- Eats less space on the hard drive (than Vista).

Frowns:

- It doesn't work with the scanner we have.

- Bluetooth is working but is acting strangely, the speed is slower than usual.

#522121

- The new taskbar is a bit too big for me but you get a couple of new functions in return such as windows media player mini-buttons (you can pause, play or get to the next/previous song without having to pull up the main program window).

You can do that in Vista and even XP, too.

#522125

Hi, I just wanted to say I've successfuly installed Windows 7 a couple of days ago, and it is at least as good as Windows XP plus some extra stuff (such as the taskbar, folders, the way you browse, etc...).

This version of the OS has really changed my viewpoint on Windows: if I had to choose between Mac OS X Leopard and Windows 7, I would just choose both.

They're a lot different in many aspects, and each one has lots of pros and little cons (other than compatibility with old programs, this just happens me for both Mac OS 9 / Classic apps and Windows XP / older Windows apps).

The thing that called my attention the most: it is fairly easy to use, if you come from Windows XP. The options are just there. Everything is where you would expect it to be. This is quite a lot different than my experience with Windows Vista (never installed it in my machine, I tested it in others'): it was horrible, I could never find the network properties, machine name setup, even the command line was difficult to use. It was driving me mad. I'm pretty happy Windows removed all these issues. Indeed it looks to me they returned to Windows XP / 2003 source code then rewrote some Vista features from scratch.

#522165

I've got a SATA (?) drive (Whatever happens to be on a ThinkPad T61), and my hard drive was rated as 2.1. Anyways, I found a solution on the Lenovo forums - trying disabling write cache: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/259716

I don't know if it's actually safe to do this, but it fixed it.

Did that and the HD jumped to 4.7, moving the system score to 3.3. Now the Centrino is holding the system back.

#522318

oh i'm going to get a vmware and install it! it looks like so much fun! and i'm glad that they shrunk down wmplayer. it's such a huge program and takes such a long time to load. it looks like they're making it a little more lightweight!

#522856

oh i'm going to get a vmware and install it! it looks like so much fun! and i'm glad that they shrunk down wmplayer. it's such a huge program and takes such a long time to load. it looks like they're making it a little more lightweight!

i dunno, if you want to run it side by side with osx then VMware is obviously the way to go but seven is all about look (the aero experience) and you'd seriously be missing out if you use VMware. You'd get the same functionality but it would look very blah.

I'm running seven on a really old computer (2002 old. yeah.) and it runs so much better than XP. the only problem is I can't get the NIC to work 100%. If I boot up and let it login with the cord unplugged, THEN plug it in after the computer realizes it's unplugged, it works then. weird. They did copy a lot from Mac and Linux. File management feels very finder-y and the "Superbar" has KDE written all over it. Overall, definately getting it when it comes out for my BootCamp Partition

Do not double post - use the edit function - mps69

#522868

I installed on my crappy 6 years old pc (1.7GB petium 4, 384MB sdram, 64MB geforce 2) and the basic style works fine, no aero at all, but it's cool anyway. When I installed Vista beta in those times, everything crashed, only the BSOD was missing , but win 7 works fine even on my old pc.

And I like the new taskbar, it does almost everything the dock does on mac os x, it's like the dock and the menu bar in mac os x ,but in one piece and without the menu.

I like it, I hope I will want to use it.

#522960

Ive just installed 7 on my Macbook Pro (core duo 2ghz, 2gb ram, 100gb hd)... installed relatively smoothly.

I tried to boot off the ISO image (macs can do extraordinary things with isos usually) , but couldnt work out how and resorted to burning it to a dvd in toast.

Now... my problem is that I need to install the bootcamp drivers and I cant find the Leopard disk! I downloaded the windows 32 bootcamp drivers from apple's site, but they just plain wont work on windows 7...

as a result all the more advanced graphical features (such as the new taskbar) has been disabled... and Im left with little more than a simplified version of vista (which isnt too bad in itself).

anyone know where I can source the drivers as they would be off the disk? id prefer to avoid torrents if I can find a quick-fix!

#523041