Windows 7

[WiizerFanboy]

Is it fail?

[Vamp [Bot]]

No.

Try it for yourself; free and legal beta: http://www.microsoft.com/windows/window ... nload.aspx

[WiizerFanboy]

I don't want to install it quite yet, since this is the only PC i have ATM and I don't want to lose anything. Is there anything that separates this from Vista?

[Vamp [Bot]]

New taskbar (way huger than you might think), quieter more controllable system tray, new wordpad, paint, calc GUIs, UAC slider, tweaked Aero theme (retains transparency on fullscreen among other things), Aero peek, Aero shake, desktop peek, window tiling, libraries replace the normal Documents, Music, Video, etc folders so you can aggregate files from more than one folder to one accessable window, more directshow codecs installed right off the bat, and the backup utility has more fine tuned control. These are the only things I noticed.

There shouldn't be any breaking changes over Vista; all of the hard work was done in that release to clean up all the old shit (like ancient driver models) in Windows; any driver that works in Vista should work the same in 7.

It's suprisingly stable for a beta; looks like it'll be solid come release.

[WiizerFanboy]

Same amount of RAM usage?

[Vamp [Bot]]

Less.

The amount of RAM required for Vista really wasn't bad; as long as you had a gig of ram or more you were pretty much fine. The amount you see used in the Task Manager is a little deceptive btw; it includes a large cache used to speed up hard drive I/O.

There's also a lot of subtle user experience tweaks that add up to a more pleasent experience (less dialog boxes, for instance, in the WiFi connection applet).

[Mericks]

Less dialogue boxes...I could very definitely get used to that.

[WiizerFanboy]

I still think it's a little too soon to push this thing out. Vista still has tons of compatibility issues, for me anyway. I'm still running XP MCE.

[Vamp [Bot]]

If you're having compatibility issues it's your hardware vender's fault for not releasing new driver; that or you just have jesus old out of date hardware. Really, Windows 7 is remarkably stable; try it in a VM even if you're skeptical.

[WiizerFanboy]

hardware vender's

I guess, it is Dell we're talking about here... My battery actually just stopped working completely and I can't use the lappy without it being plugged in. I need to hit dell up.

But I was actually talking more about Software compatibility. Some games/software work better on XP, or just plain don't work on Vista. That aside, Vista did have some cool features I enjoyed... Oh how I miss those desktop widget thingies.

[Vamp [Bot]]

Early on graphics drivers on Vista were a huge pain; if they weren't buggy they were much slower. Both of these problems have been remedied, and graphics performance on Vista should be equivalent to that on XP (benchmark confirmed). Also, Nvidia and ATI have both (finally) gone ahead and released graphics drivers for laptops on their websites so you won't have to deal with ancient OEM ones.

As for game compatibility, there are a few older ones that have problems mostly related to API changes in Vista, but since launch workarounds for most of them have been found. If something presents a problem, try a google search. That said, there are some legacy apps (Windows 98 era or older) that will have problems regardless of what you do (CnC Tiberian Sun, for instance, has huge slowdowns with on-screen effects).

[Typheus]

I'd try it if I knew how to dual boot and all that good shit, but I've been hearing some good things about it. Some people claim it runs faster.

[BreakmanX]

I have it as one of my OSs on my Mac Pro and I've had no problems with it. Nothing I really love about it or hate about it. I just love trying out OSs.