Anybody else using Windows 7 RC - I upgraded my HTPC to it, and windows 7 media center is much much better!
very happy with the new windows!

I have it running in a VM on my linux box for evaluation..

seems much improved from Vista... not that this is saying much..

If it passes muster, at some stage in the future we'll have to roll it out to hundreds of the PC's at work...

good fun

Im sorry but really what was so wrong with Vista. When it came out there was poor driver availability, so it scored massively bad publicity and suffered accordingly. Apart from that, really what is so wrong with it? Has heaps of good features, mostly evolutionary rather than revolutionary but XP wasn't a bad OS either. Its been around for a while, drivers aren't a problem anymore, new PC's run it easily and noone can tell me why its a bad OS?

certainly...

take even a top of the range desktop machine from today.. and put vista on it..

then do the same and put XP on it..

XP does pretty much everything faster than vista...... Vista is still susceptible to viruses and spyware.. it has already had countless critical vulnerabilities.. so at the end of the day.. it's slower, and doesn't really do much that XP didn't already do...

The problem isn't so much that Vista sux.. its more that XP isn't that bad and Microsoft just didn't do enough to justify the money. they also made it massively bloated considering how little extra it added.

My old man bought an Acer laptop brand new.. it came with Vista and within a week he came to tell me how his old 233mmx/Win98 desktop was heaps more responsive and how he was going to take it (the laptop) back and get a refund..

I told him to wait.. and I installed XP on it for him... and now he loves it......

It wasn't just the OS itself... OEM's like Acer were installing it on machines that just were not up to the task ram and CPU wise and it was just a pig in those situations.... If you run vista with a gig or less or ram.. it's just nasty... not as bad with SP1, but still. Vista was a fat pig until SP1.. and it still is to a degree..... and it didn't need to be.. I think it was just easier to use higher level programming tools to write the code no matter how bad a job of it they do because it's faster and costs less.... Microsoft always just assumed that with the extra speed of newer cpu's and more ram... no one would notice..

sadly for them... lots of people noticed this time.. and hence the big effort to fix as much of the speed issue as they can in Windows 7. (or at least the perception of speed)

my windows 7 beta version was about to run up and im now using Linux ubuntu and im finding it alot quicker than even XP was... they have even stolen some windows 7 features allready (or maybe they had them first ?)

My work desktop machine is a realsonably hi speced dual core machine with 4gig ram..

runs an updated version of CENTOS5 with sun virtualbox and both XP and windows 7 virtual machines..

Windows actually runs more stable in the VM's than it does on the actual machine and I do the vast majority of my work in the linux box and don't need to run anti-virus or antispyware...

small Windows programs I use like irfanview, winscp, putty etc all run perfectly in linux using Wine so don't need windows for them either.

I run Compiz on linux with gives me some really very impressive (and surprisingly useful) 3D effects using OpenGL and it looks great too.. I've impressed some academics at work with it's usefulness...

And it's lightning fast as well.... so for the first time ever, I am using Linux as my main desktop OS on a corporate desktop/network and it plays well with Windows fileservers and print and vpn servers.. I use firefox and thunderbird or evolution. for web mail... openoffice3 for word/excel/powerpoint etc compatibility..

working out very well for me because now I can chop and choose the best apps from 3 different OS types...

Linux isn't the Geek OS it used to be... Mandriva, Ubunto, Fedora.. in most cases they are easier to setup than Windows and there is more help for them freely available online.

good stuff....

having said all that, Windows7 has impressed me with its responsiveness and utility... so MS might be onto a winner to some degree.

Agreed, I don't see why Vista gets such a bad wrap. It's very stable and performs well, which is all that I ask for. Windows 7 is showing alot of promise with huge performance improvements - can't wait until the release.

There, you said it yourself...

nearly every previous M$ release has been marginally slower than the one before it... MARGINALLY....

With VISTA the difference was staggeringly big till SP1... and now the replacement OS.. is actually going to be significantly faster than the previous one.. don't think that has happened before... and it's why Vista gets a bad rap. massive bloatware and the slowest most resource hungry OS microsoft has ever made.... and that includes it's replacement (windows7)

im running win7 on my main pc and im loving it , seems to be alot quicker smoother and less buggy that when i had vista on it ,

i even like the stylin of it so much ive got a windows 7 theme in win xp running on my laptop

I've been using RC build 7100 now for a while. I haven't tried any of the newer builds yet as my sound card drivers apparently don't work properly with the newer builds. Asus driver support blows worse than Creative.

Windows 7 is to Vista what XP was to 2000.

omg yes asus drivers are s**t i tryed for 2weeks to get soundcard drivers for a vinatge ae1 to run in vista ended up giving up and putting xp back on it

Not really... 2000 was bascially just XP without the eyecandy...

Most IT folks were pretty happy with 2000, especially after the 4th service pack fixed most of the little issues.

2000 was the first decent OS microsoft made.... it was fast and stable.. XP made both more so.

Vista did neither.

I've got Windows 7 running on my HTPC, upgraded from Vista. Windows Media Centre s**t all over Vista Media Centre, I can actually play DVDs now, use time shifting and FF/RW on recordings and the OS itself seems way more responsive over what it did on Vista.

Ok.. so you agree that 2000 and XP have a lot in common.. One is the progression of the other.. So why are you saying not really to my statement than Win7 has a lot in common with Vista?

XP wasn't great either until SP2.

XP was roughly the same speed as 2000, you didn't take a huge performance hit to get the eye candy.. and drivers were compatible for the most part. XP was NOT massively faster than 2000, there was very little in it..

Vista is heaps slower than either Windows 7 or XP.... so I'm not sure what the point of your comparison is???

It isn't just me saying it...

let me put it another way... look at it from a corporate perspective.

we have 500 PC's where I work... all current and only a couple of months old... all with 2 gig of ram and dual core..

we had a choice and we unanimously picked XP over Vista after trials..... and the reason was a really simple one...... if the new OS would allow people to do any work stuff faster, then we'd go with it..... problem was that the opposite was the case.... vista was slower than XP, but didn't offer anything "extra" that made that slowness worthwhile......

The academics and professional staff at the uni don't care about eye candy... they want the fastest most productive setup they could have.. and when the choice was between XP and Vista.. Vista lost in every criteria we looked at.. When Win7 is final..we'll evaluate again...

Sure, your machine may run Vista great.. and it feels responsive etc..... but how much better would it have run with XP???? you lost the extra performance to get the eyecandy and if your work involved computing massive numbers into statistics.... that would be time and money lost...

One of our guys runs calculations on 100 gigs of data at a time.... and after much trial and runs, he now uses Linux to get the most speed out of his machine...... to these people, speed is their prime concern... and if it ever comes to a choice between speed and eye candy.. they will always go for the former.

yeah i just upgraded from xp media center on my dedicated htpc, i had time shifting and dvd's working on that. But win 7 media center is just the next level, native driver support, it was the most unstressfull windows install i have ever done. Media browser and music browser plugins are awesome, and im running the black theme.
Kudos to microsoft on this one, much faster!

I have xp on my main desktop/server and i wouldnt change to vista, but ill probably upgrade it to 7 now after playing around with it!

I'm saying that the transition from win9x to 2000 didn't happen overnight because people lost so much in performance and compatibility. Then XP came out and by then people and developers were much more prepared for it. Vista was a different design to XP and it broke compatibility and performance again. Now 7 is coming out and people and developers are used to the way this new OS works.

The business environment of course is much different from the home environment, at home people like to play games, at work people don't give a s**t as long as it just works efficiently.

edit: I personally don't like the way XP handles a quad core, I/O operations, and i need x64 to address all my RAM.

All 2000 was was NT4 workstation with USB native support and tidied up abit... and when 2000 came out.. you could still buy Windows ME...... maybe microsoft made ME that bad to make 2000 seem more friendly?

As for performance, only games were faster on win9x (ie directx).... and not by much... for normal apps, 2000 was a little faster than win9x and a whole lot more stable.

Dude.. if you like Vista, that's fine...... use it... to each their own, one of you asked why people bag it and I told you..

I agree with XP and ram limitations.... it's a pain... but if XP on a 2gig ram machine is faster than Vista on a 4gig machine.. I'll still take XP..

Win Windows 7 SP1 comes out.. we will very likely roll it out though the whole school.... unless the government has mandated OSS software by then...

running windows 7 64 runs well had no problems so far ,for me im running vista and 7 on same pc and windows 7 is heaps faster to boot and open applications .vista hasent given me any problems for a while just slower .windows 7 looks very promising fast,stable and easy to use .

I am running Win 7 X64 and have been since the Beta started. At the moment I am using the RTM 7600 16385 and I think it is bloody fantastic. I even got the transfer speeds on my LAn to work better.