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...