Quote from Bob Smith :

Forgive me if I sound like an idiot as I haven't tried Win7 yet, but how is this different to the current "Tile Windows" options on the start menu?

With the 7 you can drag a window to the side of the screen and it snaps there and maximizes to half of the screen width.

Dragging to the top maximizes a window.

Unless I was the laughing stock of XP's UI design team, I always had to clear all the other windows as the 'tile vertically' would tile all open windows to small slices. Now I can throw Lightroom on the other side of the screen and easily swap between browser window, Photoshop, etc. on the other side while keeping lots of other windows open in the background.

Installed via Virtualbox and now working. The stuff spanky mentions above is quite cool and intuitive. A lot of the hardware based stuff on the display isn't working, so I can't use the peek (Preview Desktop) stuff. Gadgets are a lot better than in Vista (no sidebar!), but of course I can't judge performance on a VM.

But it doesn't strike me as though MS have had a team of hundreds of people working on Windows since XP. It feels like about a months work, three weeks of which was the Vista debacle. That's really annoying. Windows should load almost instantly (they always say it loads quicker than ever before, but it never does), and be virtually invisible until you want it (within reason of course). But you always get the feeling, and I speak from a fairly proficient PC 'power user', that you are fighting AGAINST the OS. XP is the best of the 'modern' MS OSs because it IS fairly invisible.

But I'll keep playing and see how much of my current software/hardware I can get to work on it, via the VM unfortunately.

Quote from dougie-lampkin :

I wouldn't chance putting 7 on the same HDD as anything important (like, an OS), as it has given a fair few people problems formatting and corrupting the HDD it's put on. Safest is a new, clean HDD or a VM

I wasn't aware of that. In that case, like you said I wouldn't chance it.

Quote from gezmoor :

I wasn't aware of that. In that case, like you said I wouldn't chance it.

Exactly why im going to wait until i get another hard drive to test it on

Quote from tristancliffe :

But you always get the feeling, and I speak from a fairly proficient PC 'power user', that you are fighting AGAINST the OS. XP is the best of the 'modern' MS OSs because it IS fairly invisible.

They seem to be making each one more "user-friendly", to the point where you feel like shouting at the OS to leave you alone. That's what I loved about XP, unless you needed help, it did leave you alone. When I first turned on 7, it showed me an "action man centre" or something, where it told me I had 8 new messages, like no A/V installed, and no scan done. I freaking know, I've just installed the bloody OS. Besides, it's supposed to have a built in A/V, so why are they bugging me to get one

And there was none of this poxy "glass" crap either. For example, the thingy on Vista where it cycles through all of your open windows in 3D. I think I used that once, when I first installed Vista. And no more, because it's a waste of time. Vista looks nice, but 7 takes it too far IMO I'm not even worried about the performance to be saved by not using the glass and aero settings, as it makes next to no difference on my system. But I just think if they worked on giving the user what they want, rather than forcing a stupid shiny new UI on them and calling it a new OS, it'd be far better

You know XP has the equally annoying "Security Centre" too, right? You can turn the alerts off but frankly it's just much easier to kill the service...

Quote from Bob Smith :

Forgive me if I sound like an idiot as I haven't tried Win7 yet, but how is this different to the current "Tile Windows" options on the start menu?

Oh and FWIW it's worth, I always have my Windows set to Classic style, OSs beyond 2000 have just been wasting more and more pixels. My screen real estate is there for my programs, not for the OS to fill with blinged start bars and window titles.

I'm even worse, I set my Windows to classic, and then I install something like LiteStep to replace the original Windows shell, as I can't stand explorer most of the time. It has a few minor downfalls (my media keys lose function), but for the most part, it makes my life a lot easier.

I haven't replied here as I haven't actually tried it yet, and won't be bothering, pertly due to lack of time, but mainly because I can't be arsed.

However I thought I'd just pop my head round the door and say Windows has always been unnecessarily obtrusive, balloon popups for things that have gone right for example. I don't need to know it it's gone without a problem, I only want to know if there is a problem. To. Much. Hassle.

Well, this is a shock to me - it's actually pretty good! I installed it a rather unconventional way (inside a VM but using an actual partition) then booted it natively, all my hardware got recognised and drivers installed. The only thing I needed to do was update the nvidia drivers since there's still no OpenGL support in the Microsoft ones. App compatibility is pretty good, the only thing so far that has caused trouble is Chrome, but that was solved by a command line argument in a shortcut (and probably fixed before RTM anyway)
The "Action Centre" isn't really obtrusive at all. It's only bugged me once about the fact that I've not been bothered to check for spyware yet (well, scanning now) and that was right on boot.
And I like the new start menu and taskbar. Really, I do. It's rather intuitive, you hover over one of the window previews and all the rest of the windows become transparent except for the shadow to show placement.
It's got a bit more eye candy too - transitions etc, but it's actually performing a lot faster than Vista ever did on this machine - the hard drive isn't mashing about all the time (I have 8GB RAM - I should hope it's not). RAM and CPU usage are both down on Vista and it actually feels like a much more polished and finished product. IMO this is what Vista should have been to start with.

What VM are you using that allows the fancy visual stuff of 7 to work?

Quote from tristancliffe :

What VM are you using that allows the fancy visual stuff of 7 to work?

I think he only used the VM for installing it to a dedicated partition.

Ah yes. I see that now. I originally read it differently (by somehow ignoring the word natively ).

Quote from pb32000 :

I haven't replied here as I haven't actually tried it yet, and won't be bothering, pertly due to lack of time, but mainly because I can't be arsed.

However I thought I'd just pop my head round the door and say Windows has always been unnecessarily obtrusive, balloon popups for things that have gone right for example. I don't need to know it it's gone without a problem, I only want to know if there is a problem. To. Much. Hassle.

I have to say that is one thing I find incredibly annoying with Windows. The damn OS keeps interupting what I am doing by bringing tasks that I've got working in the background in to the foreground whenever they finish. I lost count decades ago at the number of times I've clicked on something that was in the background when I've been trying to type an email or document or something in the foreground and Windows forces the background task in to my face ! I HATE IT !! MS Please if you change one thing about your OS change that .. it drives me up the wall !!!

Quote from gezmoor :

I have to say that is one thing I find incredibly annoying with Windows. The damn OS keeps interupting what I am doing by bringing tasks that I've got working in the background in to the foreground whenever they finish. I lost count decades ago at the number of times I've clicked on something that was in the background when I've been trying to type an email or document or something in the foreground and Windows forces the background task in to my face ! I HATE IT !! MS Please if you change one thing about your OS change that .. it drives me up the wall !!!

Lol yep.

ALWAYS classic was the old MSN messenger that allowed nudges. You'd be banging your password or whatever into a website and someone would nudge you meaning you type the rest of it into MSN. Good thinking m$.

I had XP for a while, never switched to Vista (or not for long: installed it, after 5-10min got BSOD without any reason , formatted, installed XP again, all OK since then), but now I think I'm really near to find a substitute to my current OS.
I tried Seven 64bit, and whilst I had some problems with the sound card (not 7's fault though, it was that old, only-32bit compatible, piece of cr... that caused the problem ), it worked like a charm.
I'm using it now everyday, and the only small thing that is keeping me from a complete switch is LFS. I ran out of unlocks, so I'm waiting 'till friday...

I've never been a M$ fanboy, I'm more into Apple stuff, but this time I'm completely sold... I just loved the stability, the incredible speed of the thing, the new SuperBar and, of course, the graphics.

When it will be sold, I'm sure I will get it. Of course, unless I buy a new Mac in the process or try Linux, then... it's another story.

Quote from Kegetys :

Anyone know if in Windows 7 it is as in Vista that if you want to have the 'classic' look, you will have to disable the desktop compositing (or "aero" whatever the PR department named it)?

you can have the composite stuff enabled but for whatever reason unless you also tick the box for visual styles on buttons and windows it doesnt actually work
it isnt all that ugly though imho you can freely adjust the window border colour and the buttons arent that bad
frankly the old 95 style is a bit of a mess with the much more complicated taskbar and start menu

Get my new hdd tomorrow so i think i might give this a try see how it runs

Installed it under a VM. Ignoring the "look" as clearly aero/glass whatever wasn't working, I am kind of ambivilent about it. Don't see much to excite me apart from the fact that despite only allocating half my RAM space to the OS in the VM, and not being able to get it to recognise my graphics card or the correct NIC (a result of the VM environment), it seems to be quite a lot quicker than Vista at doing things like installs. Quite wierd really considering its theoretically running on a slower machine than my full Vista install is.

So if there is that much of a performance increase over Vista I would be insterested in the final release version, despite initial impressions that the GUI has taken as step backwards in terms of finish, (can anyone else see yet another step towards making it look like Linux with the taskbar? ), but that could just well be the downgraded card it's using in the VM environment.

Second issue I've had: All the file sharing/network location awareness stuff seems to clog up the network stack, meaning I get massively increased pings. Disabled it all and it's fine. (I don't want people poking around my stuff anyway, so it's not too bad that it's all disabled)

Quote from spankmeyer :

With the 7 you can drag a window to the side of the screen and it snaps there and maximizes to half of the screen width.

Dragging to the top maximizes a window.

Unless I was the laughing stock of XP's UI design team, I always had to clear all the other windows as the 'tile vertically' would tile all open windows to small slices. Now I can throw Lightroom on the other side of the screen and easily swap between browser window, Photoshop, etc. on the other side while keeping lots of other windows open in the background.

if you like tiling you should try 'winsplit revolution' (freeware)

why cant i get internet through virtual machine? i tried everything and it wont do it , but i got windows 7!

Did you set up a virtual network or DNS? Worked straight off for me after choosing DNS, and it's not part of my home network, so it's safe

Hot damn Windows 7 is nice.

Honestly this is the most polished version of Windows I've ever used - seriously I can't believe how much better this is than Vista.

The point of windows 7 is to make Windows 8 look better
Oh thats right i said it

How user friendly is Windows 7?
How is it to work with when it comes to network? Is it the same struggle as before or have they finally made it more simple for the every-day user to sort connections and such?

And, how does it work with games, driver wise? Is xp/vista drivers compatible with windows 7, or will you have to download new drivers for these?