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Windows 7


zircon
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I get the feeling that allowing users to remove IE among other applications, is just a way to shut the European Union Anti-Trust group the hell up. As much as I do like being able to un-install and replace software on any OS, it's nothing more then a fucking joke to demand Microsoft include other browsers with their OS. Though, considering the tools at the EU, in an attempt to remain relevant, I could see them demanding that Microsoft un-install all browsers and force the user to use the command line with wget to pick their own browser.

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As far as gaming goes, I've found success if I run Steam as an admin, and then instead of double-clicking to launch a game in Steam, I create a desktop shortcut and also run that as admin. It may be redundant, but whatever needs to be elevated in order to run smoothly gets taken care of.

Just ran UT3 extremely smooth today, at my max resolution (with otherwise recommended graphics settings -- I have a 7800GTX). Source games also work just fine.

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I'd like to give this OS a shot but my 40gb hard drive is already feeling cramped dual booting XP and OSX86...and I'd like to keep my other hard drive as data storage only.

I wonder if Visual Studio 2008 works in Windows 7. I know version 2010 will be tailor-made to it, but are there any programmers out there that have gotten it to work out of curiosity?

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I wonder if Visual Studio 2008 works in Windows 7. I know version 2010 will be tailor-made to it, but are there any programmers out there that have gotten it to work out of curiosity?

From what I've heard, everything installs and works fine.

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I'd like to give this OS a shot but my 40gb hard drive is already feeling cramped dual booting XP and OSX86...and I'd like to keep my other hard drive as data storage only.

I wonder if Visual Studio 2008 works in Windows 7. I know version 2010 will be tailor-made to it, but are there any programmers out there that have gotten it to work out of curiosity?

you do know that you can get a decent-sized hard drive for about 40$ on newegg currently, right?

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So I installed 7 on an older machine...

Athlon XP 2200+

1.5GB ddr400

Geforce 5200 128 MB

Some kind of dumb pcchips mobo. (M848-ALU)

It seemed to work OK for the most part. Internet browsing was fine, documents were fine, didn't try any games because the system would start to lag a bit when multi-tasking in any form at all. That kind of thing is acceptable for some people, but the major problems arose with the network. I couldn't even copy a small file from my Ubuntu file server with Samba, or from my other XP machine. This was caused by the drivers I believe, because 7 couldn't find any for it, and because the motherboard's network drivers have only ever been made for xp. I ended up installing the old XP ones, and it turned out better than expected, and worse than expected. Surprisingly good, I could get internet and fair download speeds after installing that driver, but the bad surprise was that the system would totally lock up whenever I tried to copy any files over the local network. Kind of like how Vista pre-sp1 locked up with network file transfers, but it would freeze explorer.exe, and you would have to restart that process to even do anything.

Aero on the other hand worked fairly well even on that. Best performance of course comes when you turn on the most basic visual themes, but what could you expect with a 5200? Perhaps with a non-integrated nic card (that has vista drivers at least released for it) and an upgraded vid card (probably at least something in the 7000 series for nvidia), it could work out quite well.

In the end, I formatted the drive and put xp back on it. Athlon XP's simply perform best in that os.

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The XP 2200+ is a single core. Nothing dual about it. It doesn't even pretend lol. I am fairly sure that the Athlon XP series is all single core.

And yes, I did install Vista and ran it on there for a long time. While it was kind of stinky, it ran alright. The system was for my wife, and she liked the pretty looks, and I liked that Vista was hard for viruses to attack. She isn't what I would call a power user, so it worked fine for quite a while. The system started slowing down really heavily after a while though, so much so that she could not play a basic video files (avi, mp4, etc) in full screen without the thing skipping frames and going out of sync and stuff.

Now the system has XP on it once again, and it runs super.

Edit: oh and the video memory thing, totally true. It just needs a little extra (256 at the least), but you can do it with 128. You just have to turn it on manually.

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what is the other hand

is it good

Not as good as one would think. Quad-cores walk a fun little line where the increase of processing power...for a lack of a better term, is negated by the overhead needed to manage shared resources. It's one of the reasons you don't see 6, 8, 12 core CPU's being pumped out yet. That's not to say quad-cores don't have a performance increase over dual-cores, they do, but the two extra cores do not play the substantial part in that increase that most people expect or assume. The design on the other hand does.

Then there's the lack of a consumer market for programs that take advantage of these multi-core processors. Sure, a lot of programs run a bunch of threads, but unless the OS is tossing them on random cores, they will likely be executing on the same core.

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quads increase the processing performance in applications that are built for them specifically. however, the difference between a single core and a dual core in any application is absolutely enormous - the difference for a quad is negligible.

there are a lot of multi-threading-capable applications that say that they're good with quads, but that's just marketing crap. in reality, the quad is still shits and giggles until the majority of the programming market is optimized for it [note - THIS INCLUDES FL STUDIO, REASON, AND MOST OTHER MAJOR DAWS AVAILABLE]. hell, vista isn't even optimized for it, and there still hasn't been word as to whether w7 is. even some of the top games out aren't really built for more than a dual-core, and some not even that - far cry 2 was the first game i ever played that accessed more than one core for processing gameplay.

edit: i missed the multi-core thing phill mentioned. there's a reason we haven't seen anything more than that 6-core server cpu that intel put out at the end of last year. based on extreme multi-core tests, more than 8 might actually *decrease* the performance over a system with 4, 6, or 8 due to the simple fact that they don't have buses capable of handling that kind of bandwidth. moore's law in its virginal form applies here (i think it's moore's law, i don't remember off the top of my head), too - memory simply isn't expanding fast enough for cpu demands.

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memory simply isn't expanding fast enough for cpu demands.

Its more then just memory causing problems with larger number of cores on a single chip. Anything shared, processor cache, memory, nics, audio cards, video cards, hard drives and raids all have to be managed so that one core does not interrupt(or worse) another core well its doing its thing. Then if you get into a situation where one core is waiting for another, it turns into a big mess. Unless you start assigning specific tasks to certain cores, floating point ops on one, hardware interaction on another, etc. (like the ps3 I believe) it becomes a nightmare to mange these thing and keep the overhead of that management from screwing you over.

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i wasn't talking specific to quads, i was talking in general. yeah, clock speeds are the same, but look at the timings on a chip. for some mid-level ddr2 ram, 5-5-5-15 is a standard timing - 15 clocks to close one row, read the next one, and prep the next row! no wonder there's such a big gap.

I thought you were going to go a different direction with your comment about memory. Though I do agree with latency being a problem with current RAM and how effects a CPU regardless of the number of cores. Though, in terms of mult-cores processors, its not the only issue contributing to 6+ core systems.

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