Windows 7 release candidate?

[ViRUS]

Oh, great, then I've been having it since a week ago or so

[Maiev-]

It's free.

still too expensive

i lol'd
p.s. my sig just said 'maiev is pootastic'... epic

[lavacano201014]

I kinda like the "Your Mom" thing I have going.

[Mincus]

What are you on about Mincus, it's rock stable. I've not had 1 BSOD and I've been using 7000 since it came out, for 12+ hours per day, video encoding, a lot of gaming etc, it's been perfect.

Don't upgrade from 7000 to 7100, it will break Windows and you'll have to re-format anyway.

So, like, I've had it installed less than 12 hours and had explorer crash already.

Having said that, this is running on an old Athlon XP system and it's VERY smooth.
Vista is a no-no on the same system. Not if I want sensible performance levels anyway.

[ViRUS]

Sorry, but I have to be on Lavos^'s side here, Mincus.. I installed it like two months ago and I still have to see it crash, hang or BSOD...

But it's Windows, so it's like 80% luck anyway...

[Mincus]

Oh I can reproduce BSODs to your hearts content if you want, at least on the beta.

The official nvidia Geforce 8600M GT Windows 7 drivers cause it on my laptop.
I spent 3 hours fiddling with them before going back to the old ones.
I wanted OpenGL 3 support and the MS provided ones were OpenGL 2.1.

As to the explorer crash, I was probably just working Windows too hard.
Installing Visual Studio 2008, Steam games and copying 70GB from a USB drive whilst fiddling with a new WinAMP install and using FF was clearly too much for my poor old Athlon XP 3200+

Also been getting audio artifacts from both the beta on my laptop and now the RC on this Athlon... HOPEFULLY this is only a case of bad drivers on my laptop (I used to get the same problems under Vista until I updated the drivers). Might be a pure lack of CPU power on the Athlon, will have to see.

Overall I am very impressed with how quick it's running on such old hardware though.

[ViRUS]

Oh I can reproduce BSODs to your hearts content if you want, at least on the beta.

Try the RC, it's by far more stable (not my own experience, though, it has always been stable for me).

The official nvidia Geforce 8600M GT Windows 7 drivers cause it on my laptop.
I spent 3 hours fiddling with them before going back to the old ones.
I wanted OpenGL 3 support and the MS provided ones were OpenGL 2.1.

Try the Windows Vista ones, they don't give me any problems and even are better for gaming than the official 7 ones.

As to the explorer crash, I was probably just working Windows too hard.
Installing Visual Studio 2008, Steam games and copying 70GB from a USB drive whilst fiddling with a new WinAMP install and using FF was clearly too much for my poor old Athlon XP 3200+

lol, poor Athlon... WinAMP, VS2008 and Firefox? I'm sure my PC would also struggle on that

Also been getting audio artifacts from both the beta on my laptop and now the RC on this Athlon... HOPEFULLY this is only a case of bad drivers on my laptop (I used to get the same problems under Vista until I updated the drivers). Might be a pure lack of CPU power on the Athlon, will have to see.

I think you're cursed, Mincus On Win7, my old ESS1969 works great with the WinXP drivers, while on Vista it didn't (gave me the "Couldn't initialise hardware" sort of message) but I think I already said that on page 1

Overall I am very impressed with how quick it's running on such old hardware though.

Yeah, its performance is cool... More or less... I think they still need to use the processor a bit less though...

[Mincus]

I am cursed where Windows is concerned. I just can't persuade it to behave properly.
I tend to resort to poking it into a usable state then just don't touch anything for 6 months, reinstall and repeat. It's the only way I've managed to get through with XP anyway. Vista is marginally better for install longevity, Windows 7 looks about the same as Vista. The Audio issues actually disappeared about a month after install and only reappeared recently (no driver changes in the entire time).

I have a suspicion the BSOD problem is most likely due to Dell doing something additional to the laptop. Often laptop makers implement things slightly differently, so whilst the nvidia drivers will work on 99% of laptops, there's always a few that slip through, and with Windows 7 being so new, that % is probably higher.
I did try the Vista ones too, no luck. Probably just a laptop issue. Was annoying though, got OpenGL 3.0 support under Linux and not Windows.

Quite honestly I consider WinaAMP, VS2008 and FF a light workload...
I'm often running 3-4 copies of VS, FF with twenty or so tabs open, WinAMP is running almost all the time and I've a handful of other lightweight apps running.
It's called multi-tasking, something Windows is terrible at.

I'll have a play with audio drivers on the RC when I get it on my laptop if the issues re-appear (hopefully they won't) and I'll probably fiddle with various stuff on my Athlon.

My point with the performance was more than my Athlon XP with the RC responds approximately the same as my laptop (which is about 3 times more powerful) does with the beta. At least for general desktop responsiveness.