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Windows 7

jonoslack

Active member
Hi There
Of course, most of us use macs, and not windows . . . I have to use both . . well, actually, we only use Macs, but we do have to run windows as virtual machines. Vista was horrid.
I've been running a public beta of Windows 7 in VMware for the last couple of days.

The first surprise is the size - a basic virtual machine of XP was 12Gb, Vista was 20Gb, and Windows 7 is . . . . 5Gb (hooray)

The second surprise is that it looks nice - not as nice as Leopard, but nice, better than Vista or XP.

The third surprise is that it's fast - even the beta

The fourth surprise is that it seems to be pretty stable already.

What isn't so surprising is that it doesn't all work yet (notably the networking).
 

jonoslack

Active member
HI Ben
It's amazing - I have between 20 and 30 sites using my software, some of them with several hundred users. As far as I'm aware there isn't a single site where a single Vista machine is being used. Nothing to do with me, I can support it okay. It's just that no sane IT department will!


Such a joy using virtual machines these days rather than real ones!
 

TRSmith

Subscriber Member
This is encouraging. I have one Windows machine in the house that my wife uses. It's getting a bit long in the tooth but it still keeps chugging away. Inevitably, there will come a time when it needs to be replaced. It's nice to know there's some positive news on the Windows OS horizon.
 

etrigan63

Active member
I have Windows 7 x64 operational on Parallels 4.0 Mac. Runs OK but the lack of a sound driver causes some apps to hang. Not bad for Beta 1. I was amazed that Parallels 4.0 even loaded the x64 version. Their 64-bit client support is new to this version.
 

cjlacz

Member
Haha! I love the cartoon. Even though I'm a Mac user I'm glad to hear Windows 7 is shaping up to be decent. It sounds like there might be a lot of improvements under the hood which is where I think they really needed work.

I heard that Fusion runs Windows 7 better then Parallels so you might try downloading the demo.
 

jonoslack

Active member
Haha! I love the cartoon. Even though I'm a Mac user I'm glad to hear Windows 7 is shaping up to be decent. It sounds like there might be a lot of improvements under the hood which is where I think they really needed work.

I heard that Fusion runs Windows 7 better then Parallels so you might try downloading the demo.
Hi Charles
We're running it on Fusion - it seems very small and pretty good. Actually, it seems quite workable as a development environment . . and much nicer than Vista, but we aren't quite that rash!
 

Lars

Active member
I have to agree about Win7, surprisingly nimble and stable for a beta.

As I've said before here, I've run Vista x64 for two years as development platform, beats the **** out of XP WRT stability - on my hardware. My guess is that a large portion of people having problems with Vista are running old hardware and as a consequence have crappy drivers. Lots of evals of Vista were made early on before SP1 and before hardware makers took the need for quality drivers seriously (NVidia anyone?). Over the first six months after Vista launch, Nvidia drivers alone were the cause of over 30% of Vista problems. MS had a very serious talk with Nvidia and others in 2007 but it was too late, Vista's reputation was already burned beyond repair.

Anyway the stability we see in Win7 beta is partly a consequence of all work that has gone into making better drivers for Vista over the last two years, as Win7 uses Vista drivers.

Has anyone using Windows 7 found cool features? As a keyboard 'junkie' I've been pleased with all the new keyboard shortcuts (Lifehacker has a feature on it)
Mouse shortcuts for some operations listed in that link:

- Shake a window to hide all other windows on the desktop. Shake it again to bring them back.

- Drag a window to the top to maximize, drag away from top to restore. More ergonomic than doubleclicking.

- Drag a window to left edge of desktop to size to left half of screen, then another to right edge to size that one to the right half of the screen.

- Move mouse to lower left corner of desktop to make all windows fully transparent. Useful to see gadgets on the desktop.
 

MrSlezak

New member
When I went to test Windows 7 I just pulled the drive I had Vista on and did a clean install. I can go back to Vista pretty easy if things go sideways on me. I'm really happy with Windows 7 so far and I have not even looked at the Vista drive since putting Windows 7 on the system.
 
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