Win 7
 

It's very good.

My system is home-built. I upgrade it in pieces, so it currently contains a 2006 power supply, hard drives from 2004, 2007 and 2010, a 2008 motherboard, a 2009 video card.

This is the cheapest way to own a good system, for the adventurous; the less adventurous amongst us are encouraged to buy completely-built systems and never crack open the case.

The good news is that Win 7 did find all my hardware on installation, and made it all run out of the box. Well done.

It also discovered my Win XP installation, noticed that I was installing 7 on a different drive, and smoothly installed its own boot loader - so that every time I boot, I'm given the choice between 7 and XP.

The toolbar, which MS is currently touting in ads, is excellent. All the screens and visual effects are tasteful and designer-quality. Shadows and highlights help you navigate.

I had hoped for a miraculous boot time, but that seems too much to ask for; I think I've managed to shave one minute from the 5-minute XP boot.

One hassle seems to be that my mutt system won't go to Sleep properly. Sleep is a great power saving feature when it works; you're turning off 99% of the system. Mine never recovers until it's hard-booted.

Other than that, though, it's been a very good experience and will ensure MS stays in some control of the desktop.

Interesting. I also like Win7; I've been using it since October.

I also have a mutt system. Most of it hails from 2005. I have a newer video card (2009) and a new SATA controller (my previous one would not work at all under 7 -- I'll go look up the info for it). I also had some slight compatibility problems with my sound card, though it hasn't been too bad.

I never thought I'd say this about a windows system. It's rock-stable. I use a mix of really old, modern, open-source, proprietary, and home-grown software. Nothing has crashed the system (yet). My boot times are better than Tony's; my press-the-button to up-and-running time is about two minutes. It also sleeps and hibernates just fine. It's nice to have the thing spin down and go to sleep after 15 minutes.

Also most impressive is its recognition of the Blackberry and the Sony Walkman here; first time you plug 'em in, it goes off and gets the drivers. For the Walkman, it puts a little picture of the device up in the toolbar. VERY impressive.

OK this morning I experienced a massive crash. It turned out that my video card was pressing against the SATA cable for the main Win 7 drive. This is one of the problems with a mutt system; it isn't engineered so carefully as to guarantee the optimum case layout and airflow and whatnot. So this morning the cable worked itself into a position where it was intermittent, and the result was a system that crashed and couldn't boot.

So after I cleaned out the entire case and reinstalled the hard drive in a better location, I tried to repair Win 7 from the install disk, but it found nothing that it could repair. It left the system unbootable. Gah!

I was forced to do a full reinstall. Win 7 helpfully put most of the important stuff in a folder "Windows.old" where it saved the Program Files and Users folders. I was able to get almost everything back, after working on it for hours.

I was unhappy that Win 7 didn't give me tools to try to recover the old installation better. It doesn't even have any sort of chkdsk built in to its system tools; it's still useful, you just have to know about it. I was mighty pissed that a repair didn't actually repair anything. It could have done better.

I have an ultimate Boot Cd just 30 minutes away ;)

What is better. An upgrade or a full install?

If I take a particular class next fall I will be required to install windows 7. If I take the class this summer I will not need to.

I have a nagging fear my little puter will be ruined with 7. I know it's irrational but I like my pc the way it is. I like the ease in which it runs. It's quick and quiet. It gives me no problems. It's tiny though and I feel like I will be squeezing bigfoot into a tiny cottage.

Is anyone else using windows 7 and loving it so much?

How did it get intermittent? Something penetrate it? Sharp bend?

did you perform diganostics? stated here is main reason humans are to blame for 85% of my bung hole. I am twholio. I need teepee for my bunghole.

are you threatening me!>?

I got a virus in XP yesterday, and figured it was a good time to upgrade. So far so good.

Which five minutes is still noticeably faster than Windows 98 or 2000.

Over time, the card pushed downwards on the data cable near where it's inserted into the drive, until it was not entirely secure.

It was laziness on my part. Newegg reviews explained how the video card was very long, and might not fit into everyone's installation. When I installed it, I noticed that it was touching the SATA cables, but decided not to move the drive. I figured it wouldn't be a problem. It was.

Win 7 actually notified me that there was a problem: without prompting, it found disk corruption and put up a small dialogue box from the right of the taskbar, saying I should run chkdsk.

Do cables bundled together physically damage a cable? Or does crosstalk - cabled bundled together - cause interference?

TW

I've heard no warnings about such things. The hard drive mfrs have always put the power socket right next to the data socket...

There is a learning curve involved. I'm definitely not a power-user, but I'm liking it better than I did. (Still not wild about it, but the shrinks say I'm resistant to change, go figger) People that know computers shouldn't have too much difficulty.

Microsoft has an upgrade adviser I plan to use when the time comes and I found some vista vs 7 reports that were useful.

Thanks for your input gravdgr.

So what caused that cable damage? What is it we are not supposed to do to avoid what damage?

http://cellar.org/2010/videocardproblem.png

Here we are looking into the upright tower case. with its side cover removed. The front of the system is to the right.

The green is end of the SATA data cable, which connects into the drive. The video card is large and heavy (it takes two slots) and also contains a fan - a moving part. Over time, it sagged and pushed down on the data cable connector.

Win 7 came with April's laptop that we bought just before Xmas...I love it, and she does too. This is what should have came after XP.

I see. Same type problem is also seen in so many power connectors to laptops. Eventually the PC solder joint, connector, or plug fails.

I was rather surprised to learn how much engineering goes into the design of connectors since that is most often the point of failure including the wire and how the solder holds that connect to the PC board. Those intermittents can be difficult to find.

Just ordered 7 pro 64 bit from newegg. Hope I don't regret it.

I believe I inadvertently deleted some rather crucial registry files during a wipe of a backup drive. I got a little trigger happy with Duplicate Cleaner. A whole bunch of software wouldn't load, I couldn't run the uninstaller, Ccleaner didn't help, things were pretty f-ed.

I tried a system repair (xp) and it seemed to go ok according to XP. Things still didn't work. I ran Quickbooks repair and it didn't help, but I was able to reinstall it.

Adobe CS3 on the other hand wouldn't repair, wouldn't uninstall, I finally had to manually remove everything after taking ownership of the hidden and protected files. And it still won't re-install. I ran Ccleaner until it wouldn't clean anymore and ran a windows registry wipe in safe mode, basically, I tried nearly everything I could.

Faced with a system re-install I am thinking now is the time to upgrade to 7.

Here's my Question:
Is it worth it to get the full version rather than the upgrade, considering I am coming from a (possibly) compromised OS?

Is it worth it to have the pro version which allows me to also run XP?

Tony, which version did you install and was it on a separate drive than XP?

I'm tempted to go out this afternoon and buy it at staples even though it is about $40 more than ordering it.

Any opinions?

Thanks

You won't, that's what I'm running and it's been a dream so far. Most stable, clean and easy to use OS I've ever had. Runs like a champ.

Aa, a little research and even though I have a dual core pentium processor I can't run 7 on this box. The processor is 32 bit and I'm guessing the motherboard is not adequate. Dell and Windows told me to upgrade my hardware. I'm wondering if I can just upgrade the CPU and the MB.

Probably, what is the current motherboard?

I have Home Pro. You can't upgrade from XP...

I installed on a new drive entirely.

a Dell 0HJ054, here are the technical specs:
http://support.dell.com/support/edoc....htm#wp1052310


//CPU: Intel® Pentium® 4 5xx and 6xx processors with Hyper-Threading Technology
- up do Prescott P4 Kit, 650, 3.4G, 800FSB, 2MB
//Memory :400 MHz and 533 MHz DDR2 unbuffered SDRAM
256 MB, 512 MB, or 1 GB non-ECC( up to 4Go)
//chipset : Intel 945G Express
// audio : SigmaTel® STAC9220
//Expansion bus :
Bus type PCI 2.3
PCI Express® x1 and x16
Bus speed PCI: 33 MHz
PCI Express:
x1 slot bidirectional speed – 500 MB/s
x16 slot bidirectional speed – 8 GB/s
PCI Connectors Two
Connector size 120 pins
Connector data width (maximum 32 bits

PCI Express Connectors One x1
Connector size 36 pins
Connector data width (maximum) One PCI Express lane

PCI Express Connectors One PCI Express x16
Connector size 164 pins
Connector data width (maximum) 16 PCI Express lanes

// Power : 305 W,1039 BTU/hr, 90 to 135 V and 180 to 265 V at 50/60 Hz.

I was able to reinstall Adobe, just finished. I ran Belarc Adviser and was confused to see that my CPU is 64 bit ready, but the specs for the PCI connector width say 32 bits max. Are they talking about the same thing? Most online sources say the CPU is not hyper threading, but Dell says this is, though some aren't. Belarc says:thsi isn't.

I'm gonna put off the switch to 7 for now since it is more than an upgrade, though I was thinking of getting the builder's version (w/o support) since it is almost half price.

As long as things are working again, I'm going to be happy. And much more careful with Duplicate Cleaner.

The PCI bus <> CPU bits
 

The PCI bus itself is only 32 bits in consumer machines. This has no bearing on the CPU, which can run 64-bit Windows fine. They refer to completely different things.

Honestly, if I were you, I'd run XP on that P4 and get a new PC with 7. 7 will run, and I have run Vista on a similar machine, but I'd recommend 7 for a newer multicore PC.

If you have the money that's a good way to go. You can even buy a KVM switch (Keyboard, Video, Mouse) to use one display and keyboard and mouse with two systems at the same time, if that's your desire.

Nah, there's no new computers in my future. I'll keep this one until I have no other choices or until I have more disposable $.

I just installed Home Premium recently. It's great. I've already made some customizations, and I really like some of the included and downloadable desktop gadgets.

one question tho: How do I get rid of the Favorites button in IE8?