Windows 7

[Guest Slinky]

1) How is older game compatibility? Have any people tried out SNES emulators, DOSBOX, and 90's games like Thief 2, Infinity Engine games and Fallout? I can't get an OS that can't deal with Fallout or Torment.

Personally tested:

DOSBox: Works

Baldur's Gate II with ToB: Works

Fallout 1&2: Works

Planescape Torment: Works

 

I have also seen reports that Thief 1&2 works too. Most of the games I like and play are from 1998-2005, and every single of them work without a hitch. Arx Fatalis needed win98 compability mode to stop it crashing all the time, but thats it.

 

2) Compared to XP (not Vista) is there a noticeable performance boost or drop, on the whole for you personally?

My PC boots up a lot faster, but I can't see any other differences.

[LadyCrimson]

My PC boots up slower.

[mkreku]

My Vista install booted really fast but was practically unusable for five minutes after booting. Is Win 7 the same?

[LadyCrimson]

Win7's after-boot usability time is super-fast on my system. Desktop appears, I click on whatever and away I go. Almost instant.

 

XP might've been a tad slower in that regard on same system, but again, not so you'd be bothered/notice much.

 

Edit: I will be interested to see how Win7 speed does long-term. XP was (for me) very stable & would run ok even w/out reformatting for ages, but it tended to start to slog noticeably before too long. Wonder how long it'll take for Win7 to become more sluggish as one installs/uninstalls blah blah.

Edited December 16, 2009 by LadyCrimson

[Arkan]

As I stated earlier in this thread, on a 1GB netbook with 1.6 GHz Atom processor, Windows 7 works fine with all the bells and whistles enabled (Aero, peak, etc). The memory/processor gauge gadgets showed it was using about 60% of memory while idle. This was a clean install.

 

On my older laptop (Inspiron 1520 bought in Nov 07) had XP on it, so I wiped the drive and installed 7 on it. Everything is very responsive and snappy. Of course, it's a clean sytem, so it really should. But as a gamer and casual user of XP, I'm glad I made the switch.

[Tigranes]

I'm not a fan of dual booting. I put down the cash for a pretty good laptop a year ago, but it's not going to be state-of-the-art and I like to maximise performance, HDD space, etc. and not make things needlessly complicated.

 

In general it sounds like I won't see any noticeable performance decrease, and if my setup goes like deathdealer's I'll be able to play all the old games as well. Those are pretty important conditions for me, I don't mind having to turn off bells and whistles on the newest games but lag when accessing My Computer or running multiple tabs is a real pain... and of course the number of good games in the last decade is much higher than this decade.

 

The main reason I was thinking of upgrading was because well, I'll be reformatting anyway, and while XP is still being supported you have to think it will now start fading away, and in general I think I'll start experiencing more issues with it being outdated in the years to come. You have to make the jump sometime, I'm just glad XP served so well past the pit of goat dung that was Vista.

[Humodour]

I'm not a fan of dual booting. I put down the cash for a pretty good laptop a year ago, but it's not going to be state-of-the-art and I like to maximise performance, HDD space, etc. and not make things needlessly complicated.

 

Dual-booting has nothing to do with performance and only occupies about 5GB of HD space extra for the second OS (assuming you've got a storage partition where you put all your files, games, data, which is best practice even without dual-booting for performance and backup reasons). As for 'needlessly complicated', it's a simple binary choice when you boot up.

 

Fail, Tigranes.

[mkreku]

Not only is it a binary choice, you can set the computer to do it for you if you're too lazy to do it yourself. I had XP as my default choice and 3 seconds as the time before it automatically went with the default.

 

Fail, Tigranes!

[LadyCrimson]

I guess I fail too, then, since I don't like dual boot ups either. But for me it's more that I like to have both on & accessible at the same time, networked together. Monitor switchbox & 2 or more PC's ftw.

 

The main reason I was thinking of upgrading was because well, I'll be reformatting anyway, and while XP is still being supported you have to think it will now start fading away, and in general I think I'll start experiencing more issues with it being outdated in the years to come. You have to make the jump sometime, I'm just glad XP served so well past the pit of goat dung that was Vista.

I think Win7 will be popular enough that in a couple years at most, XP may well be out the door for new software.

[Killian Kalthorne]

Comparing VIsta to WIndows 7 I have to say Windows 7 is a sure winner. It has all the stability of Vista, which was more stable for me than XP or ME combined, but without any of the bloatware. SO far I have no problems on the gaming front and with 4 gigs of RAM I got a score of 7.1 on the Windows Experience meter.

 

I BACK AS A PC GAMER!

 

WOOHOO!

[Tigranes]

Oh, I'm well aware that the process of dual-booting itself is not complicated. It's more of a general attitude thing for me, with computers. I know my way around and can fix most problems myself, but get lost when things get serious - so the best way to have a stress-free computer life, I've found, is to keep things simple. I might try dual-booting with XP if my Win7 setup seems to fail with older games, I guess.

 

I'll do the upgrade around the 26th and let you guys know, I'm sure I'll break something or other.

[zerexaki]

I'm also a person that doesn't do the dual boot thing. I'd rather have two computers with different Operating Systems then dual boot both on one computer. For me it seems easier.

[Arkan]

It has all the stability of Vista,

Uhhh.......huh?

[Killian Kalthorne]

What? No matter what I did to the Vista computer it never crashed.

[Arkan]

What? No matter what I did to the Vista computer it never crashed.

 

Vista itself never crashed for me, either. It was other programs that had problems. Thankfully, I only had it for about a week until I got the greatness that is 7.

[Killian Kalthorne]

I will not deny that Windows 7 is better than Vista for it most certainly is.

[mkreku]

Ok, so I was feeling especially Christmas-y and decided to try out Windows 7 and give it a chance. I ripped out every piece of hardware in my computer case, vacuumed them (!) and put them back together with a fresh install of Windows 7 waiting.

 

The actual install process was very slick. It asked perhaps two questions and then it didn't bug me until it was finished. The entire process took perhaps 20 minutes. I was surprised at how well all my previously undiscovered hardware worked directly under Windows 7 (XP had big problems getting anything to run without official drivers), but I installed the latest official drivers anyhow and everything worked smoothly.

 

Then I started installing all the applications I use and they all seemed to work fine. Spotify, Paint.net, Visual Studio 2008, Notepad++, MSN Live Messenger, everything works like a charm. I was actually very happy with how it behaved up until then.

 

But then I wanted to get all my backup pictures back on my hd. I had (for convenience) archived them in a zip archive and burned them to a DVD. It was easy to copy the file from DVD to Windows 7, but then I started unpacking it. It was close to 10,000 pictures and at first Windows 7 just.. stopped. Then a small counter started moving in the bottom left of Explorer. It took probably up to three minutes to just count all the files in the archive. That felt like a bad sign, but I wanted to unpack it anyhow. I directed it to my pictures folder and started unpacking. One hour later it was done. It took XP perhaps 10 minutes to PACK them! W. T. F.?

 

Anyhow, I got this version of Windows 7 from my university so it's legit.. and in English. But they supplied a language pack on another DVD, so it didn't bother me at all. After a while I was tired of the English everywhere so I decided to install the Swedish language pack. But how? I checked the Windows help and it guided me to a button.. that didn't exist. So I tried installing it from the setup file on the CD. It couldn't recognize the format. I went googling for help.. and after hundreds of useless Microsoft "help" pages, I realized that my version of Windows 7 (Professional) doesn't support language packs. Gee, thanks.

 

Slightly pissed off but still quite positive about Windows 7 (hey, it works) I started installing a few start-up applications (Catalyst Control Center, EasyTune 6 etc.). They demanded a restart. "Windows, haha", I thought and restarted a few times. Every time I did so, an annoying pop-up appeared saying something like "Do you really want EasyTune 6 to be able to affect your computer?!". Uhm, yes.. that's why I just installed it..? So I clicked yes. But for every program I installed I got an additional warning pop-up. I stopped after three start-up programs, because now, every time I start my computer, I am greeted by three angry looking warning signs asking me if the three start up programs I want to automatically load on start up are really safe. The ****ing OS doesn't understand after the hundredth time of answering "Yes", that maybe, just maybe, I intentionally installed those programs because I wanted them to start up automatically.

 

Very pissed off I installed ImgBurn to be able to burn a Christmas present to my mom (a years worth of pictures of me, who wouldn't want that?) and set it up the way I want (large cache, automatic write speed etc.). It's an ordinary DVD, but.. Windows 7 somehow manages to have the hard drive spinning at max at all times so my expensive 100+ MB/s throughput Hitachi hard drive can't keep up with the gigantic demand of 4x speed on the DVD burning (that's like.. 5 MB/s)! It actually had to stop and refill all the caches two times during the burning because Windows 7 prioritized something else (even though I put ImgBurn at the highest level of priority). FFFFFFFFFFUUUUUUUUUUU..

 

By that time I was so angry I just turned off the computer and went to bed. This morning, a few hours before writing this post, I woke up and turned on the computer again.. only to be greeted by Windows 7 closing down all my applications and saying "You are not using a genuine copy of Windows 7". So again I go to Windows help to figure out what's wrong.. except the help is online based and Windows 7 doesn't allow me access to the Internet because I am not genuine enough. Enraged I stumble through all the incredibly unintuitive menus in the Control panel (while Windows 7 is nagging me about how unsafe I am via a dozen of pop up windows) and finally find an option where I can change my product key. So I do that and Windows 7 tries to activate it.. through the Internet.. which does not work.. because Windows 7 doesn't allow Internet on non-genuine copies..

 

I managed to borrow a laptop from a friend, hooked it up on my home network, found a Microsoft phone number (that wasn't toll free for us cell phone users!) and finally managed to activate it, through the phone. What else could go wrong then? Oh, nothing much.. except I just discovered that I am getting some weird ass bug with my system tray.

Yes, everything except volume control and Spotify is invisible. I can't touch the programs, I can't reach them, I have no way of telling what they are. Lovely. Just lovely.

 

So yeah, that's basically my experience of using Windows 7 for a day and a half. ****ing fantastic.

[Tigranes]

I realized that my version of Windows 7 (Professional) doesn't support language packs. Gee, thanks.

 

Crap. With the amount of Korean things I use, that's a dealbreaker. Aren't 'Enterprise' or whatever higher up versions much more expensive?

 

mkreku scared me

[Arkan]

Ok, so I was feeling especially Christmas-y and decided to try out Windows 7 and give it a chance. I ripped out every piece of hardware in my computer case, vacuumed them (!) and put them back together with a fresh install of Windows 7 waiting.

 

The actual install process was very slick. It asked perhaps two questions and then it didn't bug me until it was finished. The entire process took perhaps 20 minutes. I was surprised at how well all my previously undiscovered hardware worked directly under Windows 7 (XP had big problems getting anything to run without official drivers), but I installed the latest official drivers anyhow and everything worked smoothly.

 

Then I started installing all the applications I use and they all seemed to work fine. Spotify, Paint.net, Visual Studio 2008, Notepad++, MSN Live Messenger, everything works like a charm. I was actually very happy with how it behaved up until then.

 

But then I wanted to get all my backup pictures back on my hd. I had (for convenience) archived them in a zip archive and burned them to a DVD. It was easy to copy the file from DVD to Windows 7, but then I started unpacking it. It was close to 10,000 pictures and at first Windows 7 just.. stopped. Then a small counter started moving in the bottom left of Explorer. It took probably up to three minutes to just count all the files in the archive. That felt like a bad sign, but I wanted to unpack it anyhow. I directed it to my pictures folder and started unpacking. One hour later it was done. It took XP perhaps 10 minutes to PACK them! W. T. F.?

 

Anyhow, I got this version of Windows 7 from my university so it's legit.. and in English. But they supplied a language pack on another DVD, so it didn't bother me at all. After a while I was tired of the English everywhere so I decided to install the Swedish language pack. But how? I checked the Windows help and it guided me to a button.. that didn't exist. So I tried installing it from the setup file on the CD. It couldn't recognize the format. I went googling for help.. and after hundreds of useless Microsoft "help" pages, I realized that my version of Windows 7 (Professional) doesn't support language packs. Gee, thanks.

 

Slightly pissed off but still quite positive about Windows 7 (hey, it works) I started installing a few start-up applications (Catalyst Control Center, EasyTune 6 etc.). They demanded a restart. "Windows, haha", I thought and restarted a few times. Every time I did so, an annoying pop-up appeared saying something like "Do you really want EasyTune 6 to be able to affect your computer?!". Uhm, yes.. that's why I just installed it..? So I clicked yes. But for every program I installed I got an additional warning pop-up. I stopped after three start-up programs, because now, every time I start my computer, I am greeted by three angry looking warning signs asking me if the three start up programs I want to automatically load on start up are really safe. The ****ing OS doesn't understand after the hundredth time of answering "Yes", that maybe, just maybe, I intentionally installed those programs because I wanted them to start up automatically.

 

Very pissed off I installed ImgBurn to be able to burn a Christmas present to my mom (a years worth of pictures of me, who wouldn't want that?) and set it up the way I want (large cache, automatic write speed etc.). It's an ordinary DVD, but.. Windows 7 somehow manages to have the hard drive spinning at max at all times so my expensive 100+ MB/s throughput Hitachi hard drive can't keep up with the gigantic demand of 4x speed on the DVD burning (that's like.. 5 MB/s)! It actually had to stop and refill all the caches two times during the burning because Windows 7 prioritized something else (even though I put ImgBurn at the highest level of priority). FFFFFFFFFFUUUUUUUUUUU..

 

By that time I was so angry I just turned off the computer and went to bed. This morning, a few hours before writing this post, I woke up and turned on the computer again.. only to be greeted by Windows 7 closing down all my applications and saying "You are not using a genuine copy of Windows 7". So again I go to Windows help to figure out what's wrong.. except the help is online based and Windows 7 doesn't allow me access to the Internet because I am not genuine enough. Enraged I stumble through all the incredibly unintuitive menus in the Control panel (while Windows 7 is nagging me about how unsafe I am via a dozen of pop up windows) and finally find an option where I can change my product key. So I do that and Windows 7 tries to activate it.. through the Internet.. which does not work.. because Windows 7 doesn't allow Internet on non-genuine copies..

 

I managed to borrow a laptop from a friend, hooked it up on my home network, found a Microsoft phone number (that wasn't toll free for us cell phone users!) and finally managed to activate it, through the phone. What else could go wrong then? Oh, nothing much.. except I just discovered that I am getting some weird ass bug with my system tray.

Yes, everything except volume control and Spotify is invisible. I can't touch the programs, I can't reach them, I have no way of telling what they are. Lovely. Just lovely.

 

So yeah, that's basically my experience of using Windows 7 for a day and a half. ****ing fantastic.

 

That's the first I've heard of such problems, but then, I don't do half the things you do, it seems. So far Windows 7 works like a dream for me. It's fast, stable, and pretty (hurr!).

[Spider]

The pop-ups can be disabled changing the UAC settings. I used to get warning messages like those from RivaTuner, but since I realized I didn't need that anymore, it's been all good and I have UAC set to always notify. It's nowhere near as annoying as it was in Vista.

 

As far as the second problem, with the missing icons, you can always check you settings in control panel/notification area icons. It's possible they're set to not appear.

 

Only issue I've had is that my internet would lose connection when under heavy strain, doing the exact same thing under Vista did not have this effect. But once a proper Windows 7 driver was released and installed, this went away.

[LadyCrimson]

Heh yeah the popups for everything under the sun annoyed me at first too. I have them off now and get nary a one. The little white flag in the r-corner of taskbar is still there, but it knows better than to bother me with any disruptive messages, now.

 

Things like non-appearing icons and unintuitive changes are why I almost immediately altered Win7 interface & taskbar to behave a lot more like XP. It was a bit of work, but worth it.

[Tigranes]

Right. Installing Win7 on Christmas, of all things - we'll see how it goes and if I can come back online.

[Deadly_Nightshade]

Right. Installing Win7 on Christmas, of all things - we'll see how it goes and if I can come back online.

 

Good luck!

[Tigranes]

Well so far it's amazing. It reformatted a 320gb drive virtually instantly, installation itself took about half an hour. It automatically set up my internet, sound, everything, and after 5 minutes of tweaking it's totally useable (i.e. after turning off stupid notifications and alerts). Installing all my programs and restoring backup and will see how everything works, but so far it's miles ahead of previous OS's on painless installation.

 

edit: after a few hours with it, looks a keeper, though with its glitches. In general the OS itself looks really good: good performance, a few nice tweaks I'm fond of, a few nice tweaks I'm not so fond of but can hide / not use, purty, picks up everything quite well.

 

Games reports:

Sanitarium works with Win98, 256 Colours, Disable Visual Themes / Desktop composition / display scaling options in compatibility mode.

Fallout 2 needed manual installing (see NMA), high-res patch (see NMA) then a little bit of ini editing described here.

Torment worked right off the bat.

Thief 2 needed enabling safe textures and using imagecfg to make sure it only uses one CPU (see here); better than my XP setup, which couldn't get it to work.

 

Still need to try dosbox, bg2, the longest journey.

[Syraxis]

Got a Win 7 x64 OEM disc for xmas from my folks.

 

Installation was for the most part smooth and painless, with the exception of my wireless LAN card. Had to pull out laptop and google instructions for my linksys card (since there's no Win7 drivers for them.) But finding that wasn't bad at all.

 

So far really enjoying the new OS, no regrets.

Edited December 25, 2009 by Syraxis