Windows 7 on main machine

I’ve decided to give Windows 7 another go, as there have been a few driver updates. This time in changed my SATA2 drive to Native mode instead of AHCI, and the install went flawless.

Once up, Windows downloaded 5 updates, and had 4 additional drivers for my Bluetooth dongle, Marvell 88E8001 Gigabit LAN, ATI 2900 Graphics card, Razer Copperhead gaming mouse.

The spec of my machine is as follows

ASUS M2R32-MVP
AMD Athlon 64 X2 6000+
4Gb OCZ 6400 Memory
ATI 1Gb HD2900 XT PCI-e
1 x 500Gb Western Digital SATA2 Drive
2 x 250Gb Western Digital SATA2 Drives
1 x Pioneer 112 DVD-RW (Again wiped out the Pioneer 212 SATA drive as this again caused issues)
Onboard ADI 1988A Soundcard (Wiped out the SoundBlaster Xtreme Gamer sound card, don’t ask !)
Acer AL2216 Monitor
Acer AL1916 Monitor
Razer Copperhead Gaming Mouse
Logitech G15 Gaming keyboard
Creative 5.1 Surround speakers.

Windows 7 now works fine, with the new driver updates, and the download of the Logitech G15 driver and utility, everything seems smooth. I did however have a problem where every 5 minutes or so, Windows would give me a BSOD with a tdx.sys error message, however after a little bit of googling, it seems Windows 7 has a problem with AVG Free anti-virus.

Granted I was only up and running for a few hours last night, but I did a little bit of testing.

Steam, worked fine, all games apart from World of Goo seemed to work ok, apart from all games being at a status of “Download Started…”

Warcraft worked fine, infact better than fine, I saw an increase of over 20 frames per second.

Itunes, worked flawlessly

Left 4 Dead work, and worked very well, without a glitch

Gadgets I’ve tried, and worked.

WhetherBug
Multi Meter (D)
Network Meter v2.1
GMail Checker
Utorrent Gadget

Now this is running fine on my main machine, I will create further blogs as I decide if I love/hate Microsoft’s latest operating system. So far I think it’s quicker, uses resources better, is stable, however it’s still early days.

I would like to point out that I have a lot of 720p content on my NAS drive, and without installing any video or audio codec, it played the videos straight out of the box, very impressive

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Windows 7 Beta, a couple of weeks in.

I’ve now been using windows 7 beta on my spare machine for a couple of weeks, and it pains me to say, I’m impressed.  It’s rock solid, and not fallen over once.

The machine I’m running it on is a Dell Vostro 220 that I bought toward the end of last year.

The Spec is as follows

2Ghz Core 2 Duo

2Gb Ram

2 x 150Gb Sata Hard Drives

ATI 3450 256Mb Dedicated Graphics

Onboard sound

All driver I’m using are in inbuilt Windows drivers, apart from the ATI drivers which are beta.

I’m currently running, Tversity, Utorrent, MKV2VOB, Imgburn, Epson CDprint. Now granted I’m not really pushing it, well apart from the Vob encoding, and the Tversity encoding, but it’s worked flawlessly since I installed it on the 21st Jan 2009.

Taking the above into consideration, I decided to ghost my hard drive on my main gaming PC, and install it on the main drive, big mistake !

Now I will be honest, my machine isn’t the best example of a standard machine, as I’ve had a number of issues with it. There is nothing phyically wrong with it, hardware wise, it’s just have had some (Microsoft hates ATI, and ATI can’t write drivers for toffee issues)

The spec is as follows

AMD Athlon 64 X2 6000+ Dual Core CPU
4GB DDR2 5400 OCZ Memory
Asus M2R32-MVP SB600 chipset Motherboard
1 x Pioneer 212 DVD-Multi Drive
1 x WD 500Gb 7200 Hard Drive
2 x WB 250GB 7200 Hard Drive
ATI 2900HD 1Gb Video Card

Now the initial problems I had were with the installation, As I have a SATA DVD drive the AHCI doesn’t like working, however I was able to crowbar the operating system on, this worked ok, however the system paused every couple of seconds, and the hard drive light lit up like a Christmas tree.

So based on this, I put the hard drives into IDE Native mode, and reinstalled, and this fixed the pausing problem.

Driver support….well apart from ATI, NONE ! I know the software is in beta stages, but Geeez, didn’t manufacturers learn thier lesson from the Vista release, I remember waiting for months for Soundblaster to release stable drivers, I ended up taking my XFI card out and using the onboard card instead.

The ATI drivers were Video only, so I have no motherboard drivers, which mean much slowness. I attempted to use the Vista drivers, nope, forget it, just hung. I found that any vista drivers I tried, just made the system hang (fair enough, they ain’t for Windows 7)

I tried to run a few games with the current machine, and they run bad. If they would run at all, they were slow and choppy.

Now I do understand, that the majority of the issues are driver related, so I’ll keep an eye on these and retest at a later date.

As an operating system, I actually can’t wait for it to come out, it’s what Vista should have, and hopefully everybody will forget Vista even happened (kinda like Windows ME).

I like the way the Widgets are no longer on the windows sidebar, I love the preview Window when you scroll over the bottom bar, like the management of the taskbar menu.

Will update when more drivers are available, but at the moment a 2 thumbs up

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First Impressions: Windows 7 Beta

Well, I have a spare machine, so thought I’d download the Vista 7 Beta, and see what’s in store for windows users.

Currently I’ve spent only an hour or so using it, however I thought I’d give my first impressions.

It’s quick, it’s stable and so far no crashing.

The UI is improved, however seems more and more like Mac OS

The below are just first impressions, and the resolution is possible, however not clear.

Currently don’t like to the fact that that you can’t change the control panel to classic mode.

There is no longer a quick launch toolbar (I need this in my life)

Unable to turn off UAC

I’m a little curious how it was able to access my NAS drive (which requires name/password), and have full access ?

as I’ve said, this are first impressions, and I will add posts when I’ve sussed out how to do the above.

edit: Ok, now I’ve had a little more time, I’ve now answered my questions. Instead of UAC, you now have a feature that gives you a sliding scale of how often you want Windows to annoy you, turning this to never, allows your to do what you like.

Sussed the taskbar, I had it locked…now I can drag and “pin to toolbar”

Sussed how it was able to access my NAS drive, it seems to be smart enough to use the NT/Authentication setting that I logged onto Windows 7 with, and try these…and it worked.

Finally as for the control panel, you are unable to change it to classic mode, but you can “show all control panel”, and this displays the log, however it does seem to reset when you go back in.

The playing will continue

Tags: 7, authentication, Beta, classic mode, control, control panel, Download, drive, fact, First, first impressions, hour, Impression, launch, life, Mac OS, machine, mode, name, nas, nas drive, panel, password, quick launch, resolution, store, Sussed, taskbar, toolbar, UAC, ui, vista, windows, windows users