Veendows 7

[Labyrinthine]

So, to anyone who has tried it - what do you think?

I ditched XP a month or so ago and setup a dual boot to Ubuntu 10 and Windows 7. Frank disclosure: I spend most my time in Ubuntu for work, so I haven't spent a ton of time in 7.

Regardless, here's my $0.02. Not going to bash on 7 because it is an infinite improvement from Vista (never could bring myself to install Vista). Overall, there are parts of 7 that are better than XP and things that are also worse.

I like thew new look (slightly bloaty, but not bad)
I like the new start menu
I like how gaming just works. Things seem slightly less temperamental than XP.
The install process is greatly improved. (Yet the upgrade process was screwy. Having to tweak the registry to be able to activate is stupid. I own a prior version of windows, I have the CD, let me prove it that way.)

Yet
WHY1!!!?? Is it 20GB. Why!?!?!?!? That's huge.
Stuff like this (http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?t=1043281) Why is there a service that throttles my gaming network traffic by default?
The sound menu. Other menus as well. XP was never intuitive, but this is just O.o?
I feel like I've sacrificed functionality for 'user-friendliness' and 'pretty.' (see above point)

Not trying to start a flame war or declare a winner out of 7, xp, and ubuntu.
So, what do you think?

[mikehale]

i think the age of whining about 20gb is over (my blu-ray rips are more than this).
sound i agree with, but it's more of a non-issue as i never really deal with it anyway.
as for menus, don't deal with them much as you can get to most everything from search. move to always opening via search and you'll never look back.
as for that steam thread, can't comment as i don't see any lag. might be windows, might be my fiber, hard to tell.

[Mongoose]

For what I want it to fo win 7 is great.  I don't care about the shiny, the config menus are horrible but they've been heading that way since the birth of gui.  Give me a good ol fashioned config file and a text editor any day.  But I want windows to play games and it does that well, no mysterious crashing, no waiting for mac beta vaporware.  I do need moar ram as I've been stubborn not wanting to invest in ram I won't use in my next system.  For that reason I cannot run multiple things at once, but win7 does run my games faster than xp did.

For all else I have a ubuntu box.  Linux, it just works.

[Latro]

OS X is 8gb..  I think Chrome OS is shooting for 1gb.. maybe a bit higher.

But, your OS doesn't need to be that big..  Windows just "bundles" in so much that they can't do much to shrink down the file size.  I'm sure if you could just installed core OS functionality it would be anywhere from 4gb - 10gb.

[Powdered!]

I LIKE WINDOWS 7.

YOU'RE WELCOME.

[Labyrinthine]

i think the age of whining about 20gb is over (my blu-ray rips are more than this).
sound i agree with, but it's more of a non-issue as i never really deal with it anyway.
as for menus, don't deal with them much as you can get to most everything from search. move to always opening via search and you'll never look back.
as for that steam thread, can't comment as i don't see any lag. might be windows, might be my fiber, hard to tell.

Nice idea with the search. I'll have to try that.

As for the 20gb. With HD sizes these days, 20gb doesn't seem like much. Still, is it really necessary?

[mikehale]

As for the 20gb. With HD sizes these days, 20gb doesn't seem like much. Still, is it really necessary?

I prefer it because as I add/remove features i don't have to download anything or put in the dvd. this is incredibly useful since i don't know exactly where my dvd is... but i never use the DVD because i have a backup image.

A tip from me to everyone, here's the install steps for windows 7.

1) Install
2) Activate
3) start backup/restore, and create a computer image. (20 gigs, bla bla bla). put this on a usb hard drive or on the cloud somewhere.

Now, if you ever need to re-install or anything, you can restore from the image file, so you never have to re-activate, and it will image your computer in ~10 minutes. really slick. i used this a lot when dabbling in the dark arts of codec packages.

[b@!!ofH8]

Nice! Used to have to use Ghost or True Image for that.  I love 7 and Server 2008.  Latro won't like this, but I use Win 7 on my Macbook 90% of the time now.  The only time I use OSX is when I need to reboot and get a VM running in Fusion.  The only fault I see in Win 7 is that they won't let you run Hyper-V on it for virtual machines.  I did like XP / Vista with VS 2005, but I can live with it this way.

[Mongoose]

If you need space go grab gentoo, you can be up and running with under 2gb of hdd.  If your used to macs, this won't work for you as some capacity for thought will be required during setup, OMG noes setup required.