My review of Windows 7 beta

[Maziar]

Hello all hope u are fine
Well i finally Downloaded windows 7 Beta and i installed it here is my opinion on it.

Boot time:
WINDOWS 7 Beta boot faster than my VISTA SP1 64bit which is a good thing,i hope the final version will be even faster.

User Interface:
When the windows came up i realized that it looks pretty well like VISTA with some changes

1_New task bar: a really fantastic feature,you can see your open apps and easily switch between them

2_Windows rate has changed.


In VISTA the max rate was 5.9 but in Windows 7 its 7.9.
I found an strange issue with this though.When i ran it,i see i got 2.9 for my Hard disk which was odd,so i did a google search and found that u have to go to device manager and choose your HDD and then go to its properties and Uncheck Enable Write Caching on Drive.

3_Gadgets:
Windows 7 doesnt have a side bar like Windows VISTA,but it has gadgets and you can put them anywhere u like.
Again i found an issue with this too,when i disabled UAC,i found that the gadgets doesn't come up,i again did a google search and found that you have to tweak something in regedit and i fixed it but it was still a little buggy.

4_Gaming performance:
I ran Crysis warhead and FarCry 2 with the same settings i used in VISTA,and i got lower FPS in Windows 7 Beta.
In CRYSIS WARHEAD the difference wasn't much,maybe about 5 FPS.
But in FarCry2 it was about 10-15 FPS decrease.
Also PunkBuster isn't supported on Windows 7 Beta which won't let you play online games.

5_Installing Drivers and softwares.
I installed Catalyst 8.12 beta for Windows 7 from ATI site and it ran with no problems.
But when i wanted to install my motherboards driver from its DVD,i got an error that it doesn't support this OS,so i ran it through the trouble shooting application and managed to install it.

For softwares i tried Photoshop CS4 extended and again when i clicked to install it,it said that my OS isnt supported but it let me continue installing it.When the installing finished i opened it and because i wanted to test it,i opened a picture and clicked on "Radial Blur"(A filter in PhotoShop) and i got the "PhotoShop Stopped working" error and it closed.


So overall i liked this OS,its still beta thats why i had some issues,i hope things will get better when the final version releases.

 

[baldarov]

great review , straight and simple
exactly what I wanted to know about this one ,
You actually saved an install & uninstall time for me

thumbs up

 

[randomizer]

Win 7 drivers probably still suck, that would explain the FPS drop.

 

[Maziar]

No problem baldi glad u found it useful

randomizer,yeah because its still a beta OS.

 

[BeachHead]

Thanks for the review Maziar as, I realise there is still a great amount of unfinished material left to be sorted out until the final product comes on the market but, hopefully, it wont be as buggy driver wise as Vista had started out as..



BeachHead

 

[Maziar]

No problems mate yeah hopefully the final release will be a good one

 

[buzznut]

Hey,
Its gotta be the catalyst drivers and immature operating system. But what I dig the most is the compatibility mode. I don't have a lot of experience with vista other than the time I spent with my laptop. 7 certainly FEELS faster to me. Except for startup, which seems to take the longest of any OS I've used yet.

But I really like how the OS is able to install stuff in compatibility that it normally wouldn't be able to. I've heard some people mention that vista can behave similarly but I have not experienced that myself.
I saw someone referring to the shipping OS requiring a certain designation for software like "windows 7 capable" or somesuch wording. I am hoping the release version of 7 does not break this compatibility mode because I find it to be an excellent feature.

I also like the new toolbar and I think that Win 7 will be a winner. But I kind of think this is typically how it goes with micro$oft.

Win 3.1 was a good os.
Win 95 was awful.
Win 98 fixed a lot of what was wrong with win95.
Win me was horrible.
Win XP was/is a great OS.
Vista was a clunker. Sorry I know some people love it, but not the general public. Or businesses.
Win 7, gotta be a winner , right?

 

[Scotteq]

In Vista: Right Click the app, properties tab... The option to set compatibility mode is there.

 

[buzznut]

oh, cool. Just shows my ignorance of the nuances of vista.
Thanks, I have a feeling I'll be fixing lots of vista machines in the future.

 

[amdfangirl]

Well Win 7 can only get better.

 

[Shadow703793]

^ Nahh... leave it to M$oft to screw something the last second.

How did you install CS4? I couldn't get it to even install. Even with compatibility. I didn't even have the continue option.

@OP: Check out:
http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/forum2.php?config=tomshardwareus.inc&cat=63&post=90&page=1&p=1&sondage=0&owntopic=3&trash=0&trash_post=0&print=0&numreponse=0&quote_only=0&new=0&nojs=0


Oh, btw. CS3 worked fine on Win 7 x86, but not x64.

 

[Maziar]

thanks shadow
I have read in some forums that people ran CS4 on winodws 7 but for me it doesn't work

 

[renegeek]

I installed Win7 build 7000, on virtual box.
Ram=700mb (virtual)
HD 20gig (virtual)
Boot time : under 30 sec.
install time: under 20min (amd 2.4gig,2g-ram)

ran nice... i'm going to try different apps.

 

[mrpresident19]

Windows 7, to me, is much simpler and fluid. I'm definately liking the new UAC among many things; instead of clicking on say continue, then screening to the confirmation in vista, windows 7 just shows a security sheild next to the first continue and skips screening to the confirmation. Small change, but I remember people complaining about how annoying UAC was when they first ran into it. There are things that come across as a more intelligent design to something, such as the shutdown/restart/sleep etc on the start menu. To know really know what i'm talking about tho you might think about trying it, I've loved it so far. Hate vista still tho..

 

[smokin221]

im not sure about framerate as ive really only played cod5 online since i installed win7 64 and since it uses punkbuster i am assuming punkbuster works just fine and honestly i have had only a couple programs so far not work with it like i had to do a workaround for google chrome to work but it works now fine and my notherboard drivers i never tried reinstalling because it blue screened me although i got bsod trying to install avg as well though next time i tried avg it went on just fine i may try my mb drivers again and i will reinstall farcry 2 to check but in vantage my cpu score was same and my gpu score went up quite drastically

 

[techdeuce]

Yes to the video drivers. I had it with nvidia 8800gts card. New nvidia 64 bit driver for vista? didnt list a win7 driver. And the old counter-strike 1.6 was running 15fps and occasionally jump up to 60. That was opengl, directx it sat around 25. Weird right? the generic win driver for the video card wouldn't run opengl at all had to run directx and it was still 25fps. So they still got a ways to go. I just wanted to test it out. I flashed my box back to XP as it is just a gaming rig and it only had counter strike and BF2 on it. Dont see why I need a 10.3 gigabyte menu to lauch CS when win2000 or xp do just fine. I did more extensive under the hood testing for work on my vmware box. Here is a writeup http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/1460760/an_operating_system_is_just_a_menu.html?cat=15

 

[johnnyq1233]

For me My Win7 system is running flawlessly! I really love the fact that when you install a game it actually puts it in the games link on the program menu.
Punkbuster is working just fine on my games. Installed are Cod5, GTA IV, Far Cry 2, Flatout 2, Tigerwoods 2007, Tom Clancy's Vegas 2, Conflict Denied Ops.
My Game ran GTA IV much faster on my 9600GT Sonic then on XP.
Teamspeak works perfect as does Remote desktop to my XP home theater pc.

 

[Maziar]

PB doesnt work with all games in windows 7,like COD4,whenever i joined a server i immediately got kicked,PB says they dont support beta OS,but for some other games like COD5(multi) i've heard that it has no problems with Windows 7

 

[johnnyq1233]

I must recant, my BF2 game that I just installed works fine and the PB.exe doesn't!
I don't really understand why it doesn't it's still pb!
The only difference being CoD5 doesn't need the pb.exe app to update.
Time to figure a work-around......lol

 

[concorde]

I heard through the grapevine that Windows 7 still takes on the Vista approach in some ways, especially of what kinds of processes and how many are running. I've used the beta version and noticed some of the same resource-heavy processes running that you would see in Vista, of which I use at work. As it's a beta, well, they may not have those resource-hogs running in the final release...

 

[cjl]

Which resource hogs are you referring to? Mine idles at 700MB RAM usage (out of 12 gigs), and the processor use is almost a flat line at 0%

 

[bhalton26]

Seems like AMD is having all the issue with Windows 7 and not Intel users. Good review and thanks for the tip on solving the Disk Transfer Rate error.

 

[ministerpaul]

I tested Windows 7 and I really wasn't impressed. It looks like a refined Vista to me and is nothing revolutionary except to our wallet. Microsoft is going to have to do alot more to convince people to buy another OS for hundreds of dollar. People who purchased Vista should get a free upgrade or stay with Vista which is pretty stable now.