Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion The Water Cooler Windows7 RC

Well, if you don't hear from me for a while, assume the Windows 7 RC installation did not go so well... I am curious though if anyone has tried the RC, and your thoughts on it. I'm just doing it to play around, and see if the fuss is worth the effort.

Hey, I hope you survive the install. I look forward to hearing what you have to say.

From what I understand, the rc is available to anyone that wants it. So how does MS extract money from you once they formally release?

The license expires early next year and in such a way that you WILL have to upgrade.

I've been running the Windows 7 beta and now the RC since it was first released (posting from it now).

I had no choice but to use Vista on my new computer. As I have 16 GB of RAM, and XP x64 (standard XP can only see about 3.2 GB of RAM) is waaayyy worse than Vista with compatibility of software and hardware.

That said, the Windows 7 beta is what Vista should have been, and the RC is actually very nice. Of course I'm running it on a computer with 16 GB of RAM, a 512 MB video card, and two and a quarter terabytes of storage which is spread across four, 15k RPM, Serial Attached SCSI, hard drives. If you have less than that, your experience may be scaled in proportion.

What do you do that requires that hardware? I'm jealous, even though what I have exceeds my needs.

Oh, forgot to mention the processors: two Opteron Quad Cores.

I use this machine to read e-mail, browse the web, etc.

I don't game on it, because I work with computers all day long. When I want to relax I don't want to be trouble shooting frame rate issues; I just want to game. I have a PS3 for that.

The biggest workout it gets is processing raw photos. I'll usually shoot a couple hundred when I have a session. Rendering them to TIFFs to send to the print service used to take about a minute each. Now, I'm down to 5 seconds. Also as I make adjustments to color, exposure, etc. the preview is nearly instantaneous; which is a big help. While I do back up my photos to an remote server, I also have a local copy of each. That's about 240 GB at this point. So 2 TB may be overkill, but one day I'll have that many.

I also used to do 3D rendering, and video compression. Not so much these days, but if the need arises I'm in a position where it won't be painful.

But mostly, I like playing with new technologies and having a hot rod of a computer.

It sounds like a good time.

What do you play on the PS3? The only disc-based game I bought for it was Metal Gear Solid 4, and I just gave that to my nephew, since I wasn't playing it. Meanwhile, I have plenty of Xbox 360 games to catch up on. I was actually thinking of passing my PS3 on to someone else who would appreciate the backwards compatibility of my launch 60 GB version, now that I'm getting an OPPO for Blu-ray playback. I imagine I'll get another PS3, but I can wait for ever-smaller manufacturing.

I have Win 7 Beta on my Dell Mini 9 Hackintosh (dual boot). Win 7 screams.

I even ran Win 7 on Virtual Box on my Macbook, with the Win 7 file on an external HDD. Win 7 ran faster than my native WinXP T42 Thinkpad. WAY faster than Parallels 4.0. I have a copy of RC that I may try this on.

I haven't run RC yet on my Hackintosh because I figured I'd just wait for the retail release in October. I don't want to install all my apps and then reinstall in a few months. For me, it's a definite buy because I found it to be very good. However, it'll take me some time to get used to the GUI since it's so different from XP and OSX.

I'm going to try 7 RC on my new Core i7 box, assuming that I can actually find my arctic silver and build the thing...