[slackline]

M$-Windoze are making the Beta release of their new operating system free for all for two weeks BBC News item and the official Download Page.

I wonder if it will be as revolutionary as Vista? 

[GCW]

No.
Stick to XP, and avoid any penguins 

[dontfollowme]

Probably to the SP1 edition.

[slackline]

Probably to the SP1 edition.

If you mean waiting till they release the SP1 edition thats kind of a circular argument since if everyone did that, no one would test the Beta (or first official Alpha release), no bugs/errors would be discovered, they wouldn't be fixed and the whole project would remain in stasis.

That said Beta testing is not for everyone.

[Control freak]

Been using windows 7 for the past week or so - gotta say its not exactly a breakthrough. Theres a few visual changes but its mainly just vista that works. Apparantly now there will be no more betas until the RC

[Johnny Brown]

Just installed this and its fuckin dynamite. Less problems than when I switched to Vista, seems faster so far and a really smart interface. If the colour management is all its supposed to be I think the reasons for having a mac just went out the window. Get it?

[BB]

Just installed this and its fuckin dynamite. Less problems than when I switched to Vista, seems faster so far and a really smart interface. If the colour management is all its supposed to be I think the reasons for having a mac just went out the window. Get it?

Fully agree. The installation is so simple my Mum could do it and it boots on my acer aspire one in around 30 seconds, which is quicker than XP boots on my desktop!

The full version of Windows 7 home premium is now available for pre-order on play.com for £50. Deal, I say.

[slackline]

The full version of Windows 7 home premium is now available for pre-order on play.com for £50. Deal, I say.

  

[BB]

I can never tell if you're impressed or appalled Slackers!

[slackline]

I can never tell if you're impressed or appalled Slackers!

I like to keep an air of mystique about my persona 

[Bubba]

The full version of Windows 7 home premium is now available for pre-order on play.com for £50. Deal, I say.

Hmmm, that's about £50 more than I'd pay for it

[Jim]

Right I'm on RTM 6400 64 bit now, will try it at some point.
Seeing as I haven't bothered putting vista on yet, I can't see any point in trying vista, I'll just skip straight from xp to this

[Johnny Brown]

You're right there, go straight to 7. Still yet to hit any hiccups.

For any homies doing OS upgrades I recommend the MozBackup utility - dynamite.

[cofe]

Jim, I'd expect a man of your calibre to have a disk with Windows 8 on it. And CS6 etc etc...

[Obi-Wan is lost...]

For any homies doing OS upgrades I recommend the MozBackup utility - dynamite.

Also if your doing a clean OS install and have a few spare Gb of storage, think about taking an image of the drive once you've run all the updates, personal settings etc etc. Saves hours if you want to do a refresh in a few months. It's what all they techys do at work, they rarely build anew image from scratch.
This freeware sounds like the one to use. Also good if you want to play with Win7/Linux etc, easy to revert of your old OS if you want to.
http://www.macrium.com/reflectfree.asp
[disclaimer: I've yet to do this on my machines but plan to shortly, suffice to say if you do use it make sure you have other standard backups of files etc in case the image restore fails, and don't blame me if it doesn't work.  :'( ]

[BB]

The windows 7 offer on play.com has gone, but I've found it for £45 here:

http://www.comet.co.uk/shopcomet/advice/758/Windows-7

[Palomides]

As someone who bought a PC with Vista on it, I certainly will not be upgrading to Windows 7.

Pay Microsoft £45 for a new version of Vista that works properly? Fuck off. They should have either done it properly the first time, or made up for their mistakes by providing free upgrades.

Vista has been an unpleasant experience for me (slow, annoying and locking out a user account due to corruption in the registry). I feel cheated. I'll use Windows 7 if I get it free the next time I have to buy a PC, until then I'll use linux whenever I can. Bastards.

And as for "it works really well on netbooks", the minimum requirements for Windows 7 are a 1 GHz processor and 1GB of RAM. So that really should be "it works really well on expensive second-generation netbooks, but not yours". Nevermind, at least I can use an alternative. Fuck you Microsoft.

:penguin::penguin::penguin:

[BB]

Depending on when you bought your PC, you might be entitled to a free upgrade to windows 7.

I got my "expensive second-generation netbook" for £150 brand new. I didn't think that was expensive, but I guess it depends on your point of view.

[Palomides]

I bought the PC before Vista SP1 was available, in an unfortunate time window when no-one had realised just how crap Vista was, and before Dell started offering downgrades to XP Pro.

For netbooks, I bought a first-gen eee 701 for 100€ (in a time before that was £100, heh). It boots faster than the newer desktop, and is nicer to use.

Did I already mention that Microsoft can fuck off? Oh, I did. Well they can.

[BB]

I'm sensing some hostility towards M$.

[Jim]

good tip there obi-wan.

Palomides - chill out, no one forced you to buy vista. Re M$ 7, remember you have a very early net book, do you think asus should give you a free upgrade to a 10" screen?

I am going to try it out after I've jet washed the wheelie bins out :yuk:
and when I get my net book next week I'll be sticking it on that (x86 version)

[Jim]

Just started using it now, looks pretty good although I'm not used to all this fancy animation stuff as I always disable it, but whats the point in having a very fast computer and not using it?
anyway, anyone had any software compatible issues yet>

[Jim]

first one I've come accross is peerguardian, there is a work around but I've not been arsed to do it yet, someting to do with digital signing

[Houdini]

So far Vista has been fine for me, a little ponderous at times - but it works.  I'll look at the 7.


Samsung have a free offer of upgrading laptops to 7 from Vista if they were bought w/in a certain time frame.  Check the website if you use Samsung.

[BB]

It's well worth a go Houd. My windows 7 netbook boots faster than my XP desktop.

[Houdini]

Having done a little reading there's no way I'll be intalling this beta version on the one & only PC my partner & I possess.  By the time I get another PC 7 will be out of testing and on it's way.

Are people really doing this on their only PC?

[BB]

oh hell no! I'm keen not reckless!

[Johnny Brown]

You can have both installed at the same time, you get a choice during boot which to use.

£45 for an operating system which you use every day and will support almost every program under the sun seems like a decent deal to me. I'm not averse to occasionally paying for software if its very good and reasonably priced.

I used Vista for a couple of months and couldn't see what the fuss was about. It wasn't terrible at all, it worked fine. My belief is people just don't like change.

Since installing windows 7 my vista install is now asking for a new product key. I'm hoping I won't need it again, but presumably the two are related?

[slackline]

£45 for an operating system which you use every day and will support almost every program under the sun seems like a decent deal to me. I'm not averse to occasionally paying for software if its very good and reasonably priced.

Being the pedant I am I very much doubt you'd find it easy to run programs compiled for the Sun Microsystems OS Solaris e.g. the regular expression parser 'grep' (which is now also open-source) under M$-7 (with out the use of a virtual machine, but then you wouldn't really be running it under M$-7 in the truest sense), but I'm being facetious as I know thats not what you really meant 

Good to hear that M$ have pulled their thumb out with the driver support by the sounds of it though.

I used Vista for a couple of months and couldn't see what the fuss was about. It wasn't terrible at all, it worked fine. My belief is people just don't like change.

You've hit an obvious nail with a very large hammer there.  In my opinion its a very large factor that prevents people from even trying out other OS's than those from M$ (obviously there are people who rely on certain software products such as photoshop for their work that have other factors contributing too though).

But anyway, enough evangelism, off to the Pass this weekend, hopefully this fucking shite weather will clear up.

[Johnny Brown]

Well, as I've mentioned before, the ability to run Lightroom & Photoshop is the dealbreaker for me. As far as I'm aware these aren't supported by anything but MS and Mac.

Windows 7 is very good, that's my impression so far. Adoption will be wide because they've added enough nice interface tricks to make dealing with the change seem worthwhile. If Vista had a fault, its that the UI was too close to XP (and could be customised to be closer). So you had obfuscation without obvious benefit.

 I may well buy a Win 7 license whilst they are cheap, assuming I don't need to upgrade for 2 years that £45 amounts to 40p per week -  lets face it, 'fuck all'.

[ChrisC]

Well, as I've mentioned before, the ability to run Lightroom & Photoshop is the dealbreaker for me. As far as I'm aware these aren't supported by anything but MS and Mac.

That's what it comes down to for me also.  People claim that Gimp is equivilent but it just isn't as good in reality.  If it were then PS wouldn't be the professionals tool of choice given that it ain't cheap and Gimp's free.

That said you can run PS under linux using Wine - I have done before and had no problems.  I'm not too sure about Lightroom though.  You can also run grep under windows using cygwin.

[slackline]

That's what it comes down to for me also.  People claim that Gimp is equivilent but it just isn't as good in reality.  If it were then PS wouldn't be the professionals tool of choice given that it ain't cheap and Gimp's free.

There is still the historical aspect of having learnt and invested time and money in PS that is a major factor in its perpetuation.  Thats not to say that it isn't a superior product to its peers, but the whole industry thing is based on people having made a name/career at being able to use one piece of software (similar situation in statistics where SAS/SPSS/S-Plus used to be industry standards, but excellent alternatives such as Stata and R are now gaining ground).

That said you can run PS under linux using Wine - I have done before and had no problems.  I'm not too sure about Lightroom though.  

Not everything works with WINE though, Nikon's Capture NX/NX2 doesn't.  If you really wanted to regularly use PS or such like then you'd be better off running a Virtual Machine and running M$ under that.

You can also run grep under windows using cygwin.

Ahh, someone else who knows/uses Cygwin.  Its exceptionally handy and something I install on every M$-windoze machine I have the misfortune to use.

Unfortunately not everything is available for it, for example I've searched and looked but can't find a package for the very handy [urlhttp://mama.indstate.edu/users/ice/tree/tree[/url] command that I use all the time and efforts to compile manually have failed.

[slackline]

The Window(s) are ajar

("How can a window [door] be a jar?" wad point for anyone who gets the quote, not too hard though )

[Jim]

after using windows 7 for a week or so now I have to admit its very good, everything seems to just work, I haven't even needed to install codecs yet.
Managed to find a patch for it to make it genuine so I am going to roll it out to all my other machines (x86 on the laptops)

[Johnny Brown]

Genuine? As in won't expire in twelve months or as in not the beta version?

[tomtom]

after using windows 7 for a week or so now I have to admit its very good, everything seems to just work, I haven't even needed to install codecs yet.
Managed to find a patch for it to make it genuine so I am going to roll it out to all my other machines (x86 on the laptops)

Spill the beans Jim - whats this patch??

[Jim]

I'm not using the beta version, its the RTM version and there is a patch to make it genuine which I found on a torrent site.
I can send you a link by PM if you PM me for it but I don't want to draw unwanted attention towards this forum

[tomtom]

I'm not using the beta version, its the RTM version and there is a patch to make it genuine which I found on a torrent site.
I can send you a link by PM if you PM me for it but I don't want to draw unwanted attention towards this forum

Cheers Jim, Will do, though I googled it and found a few free things online - which I may try first!
T

[BB]

I heard about this patch, but the version I got was that you still needed a serial number for windows 7 ultimate. Is this true?

[Jim]

If you get the latest 1.8 tool kit it does it all for you

[tomtom]

Having read some posts about W7 being a wee bit faster I've just been doing some benchmarking on W7 vs XP.
W7's running the modelling software I use/write about 10-15% slower... that is on a netboook (samsung NC10)...

[Jim]

depends if you disable all the aero theme and all the effect type stuff that xp doesn't have

[Jim]

the RTM was officially launched this morning

[ChrisC]

Build "7600.16385" - if you are searching for it... 

[Jim]

had it for a while, I suspect that there is a later build just released

[ChrisC]

Dunno - http://www.sevenforums.com/news/17713-windows-7-hits-rtm.html

This suggests that the delay from the build on the 13th July till the announcement is due to testing, which makes sense. 

[Clart]

There is a usable flash demo of the new windows OS here:

http://www.deanliou.com/WinRG/

The new version of Solitaire is interesting.

[Jaspersharpe]

Brilliant. 

[Spanish John]

There is a usable flash demo of the new windows OS here:

http://www.deanliou.com/WinRG/

The new version of Solitaire is interesting.

That looked more like vista to me
tick vg

[underground]

Dragging this topic back but, I'm jus experiencing windows 7 after 2 years on Vista and it is indeed like Vista that works, but rather like, how vista should have worked. The GUI is largely the same, a few little tweaks but nothing groundbreaking.

Lots of hype I've heard around this release - but is it just what they should have held off for in the first place? Was Vista some shonky beta release? Fuck knows - but as a windows user, my O/S life is much better now. Luckily I didn't have to cough up any cash.

[Jim]

That is the premise of 7 - how or what vista should of been.
only tried vista once and was back to xp within the week. after trying 7, loved it straight away

[Tris]

That is the premise of 7 - how or what vista should of been.
only tried vista once and was back to xp within the week. after trying 7, loved it straight away

except I gave Vista 1 month before I was back... 

Windows 7 has been on my work laptop since RC1 came out and it is going to stay...

[Jaspersharpe]

What I want to know is how slack---line managed to vote 6 times.

[slackline]

What I want to know is how slack---line managed to vote 6 times.

Bots 

[Tris]

Bots 

There is a cream available from Boots for that you know..

[tomtom]

Bots 

There is a cream available from Boots for that you know..

Rinsing yourself in diesel works quite well too... (old Russian alternative medicine... y  )

[BB]

Bots 

There is a cream available from Boots for that you know..

Rinsing yourself in diesel works quite well too... (old Russian alternative medicine... y  )

The prescription charge would probably be cheaper.