Win7 Pre-order from £49.99

[ChimpBoy]

Cheers, thanks for the advice.

Balls to it, XP does everything I need, developers need their heads read if they don't make games compatible with XP given the install base, DX11 hardly seems a compelling reason to upgrade given the lack of hardware, and all the other fancy bits n pieces are just window dressing.

I'll pick it up in 2011 when W7 SP2 comes out

[T-Bag]

Cheers, thanks for the advice.

Balls to it, XP does everything I need, developers need their heads read if they don't make games compatible with XP given the install base, DX11 hardly seems a compelling reason to upgrade given the lack of hardware, and all the other fancy bits n pieces are just window dressing.

I'll pick it up in 2011 when W7 SP2 comes out

DX11 hardware comes out in September. When I buy some I might grab Win 7 at the same time. Though it might be a while as I'll probably get Core i7 too. Need to save for a couple of months.

[suicidal_monkey]

strangely enough Vista has been chugging away quite happily for me for some time so I'll be sticking with that until some game I want requires me to upgrade

...I have been told Windows7 would be the best choice for my netbook however! Seems the graphics drivers are better than in XP and as it can be made to be less resource-hogging than Vista it's actually a good candidate :blink:

[kregoron]

Vista ran okay for me too, but swapped to Win7 for a laugh, and tbh it runs so much better its unbelievable.. much more responsive, takes up a pile less resources and overall experience then ive ever had with Vista, even in xp..

[BrotherTobious]

:withstupid: Been using 7 for 3 weeks now and it is soo much better than Vista.

[ChimpBoy]

strangely enough Vista has been chugging away quite happily for me for some time so I'll be sticking with that until some game I want requires me to upgrade

Precisely the same reason for why I will wait until I upgrade to W7 from XP.  Even if hardware comes out this year, no great glut of games are genuinely going to need or take advantage of DX11 until late 2010.
 
My only other alternative is to ply Smilodon with beer and pizza until he agrees to provide his services for helping me upgrade.  He seems to destroy his computer every six months or so, so has plenty of experience on what not to do  

[b00n]

Just thought I'd remind everyone that the official MS download of the Windows 7 release candidate ends this month.  Even if you don't plan on installing it now, you can still get license keys (but not the install image) after this month, and it will be fully functioning until March next year, so might as well grab a copy while you can.

I only got around to installing it last night, and it was a very painless experience as OS installation goes, even getting my dual boot working again was straightforward.  It rather conveniently opted not to format my windows partition (although it would've been nice if it had asked me), so getting Steam and Aion up and running again was just a matter of running the installers to sort out registry settings etc.  Found it a bit odd that it didn't have a driver for my Belkin wireless card, particularly as I'd just replaced my old wireless card for lack of 64bit support, but digging out the driver disk solved that.

Liking it so far!

[b00n]

There's no direct upgrade to Win7 from XP. Checkout the (simplified) 2nd graph on this page.

Just to clarify: I installed Win 7 RC 64bit over my Win XP 64bit partition.  My old Program Files, Windows and Documents and Settings folders were copied to a folder called Windows.old.  All other folders in the root of my hard drive remained untouched (they may have been set to 'hidden' as I don't recall seeing them when I first booted up Win7, but then I set hidden files to visible as I always do and discovered everything was still there).

I don't recall seeing the option to format the partition when I installed Win7 although I may have missed it, but if you install over XP the way I did above then all your documents etc should still be available.  Software should still physically be there too, but for most programs you might at least have to run the installers again to make any necessary registry changes.

[BrotherTobious]

I did a full re partion so deleted all the info off and then installed. All working well

[Penfold]

Spent many hours over this weekend upgrading 3 of my machines to Windows 7 Professional (twox64bit and 1x32bit). I was going to install one with ultimate but there seems so little difference between them I didn't bother with it.

Fingers crossed its worked like a charm. Have one or two older programs which won't work under 64-bit but in the main it went really well

I like the new taskbar, it's so much better than Vista imo and makes for a real tidy ship.

The new install system mentioned above where it doesn't format your drive is great for moving stuff around and although you need to reinstall the programs, it's handy having the old ones there to pull across settings/files etc.

Overall muchly impressed :thumbsup2:

[Lee]

Definitely pondering about getting Windows 7 as i've heard so many good things about it. I need to toy around with an RC version we have on one of our computers really to get an idea of it, but it is of a poor spec so not a great candidate for testing games on. However I still think i'll wait at least a couple of weeks after it's release before deciding whether to take the plunge.

[Carr0t]

I'm now running the 64bit Enterprise version of the RTM on my work laptop and my home PC. Both running very smoothly, gotta say I really like it. I have done a few framerate tests with Crysis, WoW and a few others and didn't see any difference in FRAPS, but at the same time it somehow seemed a smoother, more fluid, picture. I blame a placebo effect

[Penfold]

There's nought wrong with the Placebo effect lol.

About to try CoD4 at 1900x1200. Either gonna rock or die horribly. We shall see.

[kregoron]

I'm now running the 64bit Enterprise version of the RTM on my work laptop and my home PC. Both running very smoothly, gotta say I really like it. I have done a few framerate tests with Crysis, WoW and a few others and didn't see any difference in FRAPS, but at the same time it somehow seemed a smoother, more fluid, picture. I blame a placebo effect

it might just be in your head, but could be due to Windows 7's improved resource management.. when you run fraps or alike it only updates the framerate once like every half second, where the framerate can jump a bit more as it chances in miliseconds, so your game might be experiencing lower fluctuations in framerate, just not enough for fraps to pick it up and still enough for your eyes to see a minor difference

[Carr0t]

Sounds about right. I'd often noticed when comparing my Vista box at about 40odd FPS in Dalaran to a friend's Mac Pro at about 25-30 (lower res), that their view somehow seemed a lot more fluid. Now i'm on 7 the two look about the same.