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So I've upgraded to WINDOWS 7 x64


rasputin1963

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This morning I upgraded to WINDOWS 7, x64.

 

Why? My VISTA OS has been acting funnier and funnier by the day, slowing down and riddled with glitches.

 

I broke down and upgraded this morning more out of sheer frustration than anything else.

 

Would MICROSOFT ever stoop to anything so nefarious as to deliberately download malicious code to my copy of VISTA.... cauding it to gradually screw up in miscellaneous ways..... purposefully designed to slowly but surely wear down my patience and satisfaction.... so I'd just toss up my hands, cry "F*** it!" and invest in the latest OS? They say "All's fair in love and war." I hate to be a Conspiracy Theorist, but I honestly would not put something like this past MICROSOFT.

 

I ask this because it really did feel like my copy of VISTA was slowly coming apart at the seams..... reporting an increasing amount of errors.... for which there was NEVER any cure forthcoming from ol' MS.

 

And, sure enough, I am now living in the sunshine of this new OS, which runs like a dream.

 

The main thing I'm noticing so far from 7 is an overall feeling of briskness and PURPOSEFULNESS to the whole feeling of the OS.

 

By purposefulness, I mean that when you click OK or APPLY on any dialog you have, you are surprised to see your choice actually taking effect briskly, wordlessly and without problems. On VISTA, you'd click OK or APPLY............... then say a little prayer and cross your fingers. Half the time, the simplest of your commands would lead VISTA into a kind of Brainfart mode, the little blue-green WAITING cursor spinning stupidly in space, with nothing happening therafter, or--- worse--- the screen turning milky-white into its "f*** if I know" mode.

 

WINDOWS 7 also manages to locate third-party drivers quickly and instantly, with no tsuris. VISTA always required much handholding and coaxing and re-trying.

 

I'll let you know how SONAR x64 performs when I get it all reinstalled.

 

I had originally hoped to reinstall WINDOWS 7 as an Upgrade which would keep all my VISTA programs intact and working. Yet while installing, WINDOWS 7 told me that THIS condition wasn't right, and THAT wasn't right, and I needed to install THIS, THAT and THE OTHER first. I didn't feel like dicking with all this, so I just had WINDOWS 7 over-write VISTA with a fresh install...

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I'm running 64-bit Win7 on the new machine I put together. So far it's been very stable, decently fast, but not that different from the speeds I get from XP (which I still have as an alternate boot option).

 

I totally avoided Vista, so Win7 is not a big change for me. But there are some nice new features, and I'm hoping it's more stable over the long run. Compatibility with the many older programs I've been running in XP was my biggest problem. Basically I'm running the business stuff under XP and the music stuff under Win7. So far so good. I haven't bothered with the "virtual XP machine" option under Win7 - no need to when I can just reboot straight into the real thing.

 

One thing that's surprised me - I have the monstrously large East West Quantum Leap Pianos running on Win7 64-bit. I have heard nothing but warnings about how you have to have so much power to handle the 60-80 gigs-per-piano sample sets. So far, with 8GB RAM, I haven't taken the CPU past 9% no matter how fast I play or how long I keep the sustain pedal floored. Nice!

 

I did turn off all the fancy visualization stuff in Win7 - chose "performance over appearance" all the way. I don't need transparent overlaps and smooth transitions and all that eye candy stuff - it's pretty, but after a month in use - of no value whatsoever that I can figure.

 

Here's a link to a pretty good set of tips for Win7 optimization. Can't vouch for all of them - use at your own risk and all that - but I found some very helpful stuff here:

 

http://www.ocztechnologyforum.com/forum/showthread.php?63273-*-Windows-7-Ultimate-Tweaks-Utilities-*

 

The link is to a user forum hosted by OCZ, the company that made the 120GB solid state hard drive I'm running as my Win7 boot drive. Now THAT bit of hardware made for a truly stunning increase in speed.

 

nat whilk ii

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Win7 sounds encouraging. I'll see it down the road. I've already decided that my 'ole 3Ghz P4 WinXP Dell tower will be repaced by a Mac Pro when it dies and my '06 core solo Toshiba Satellite WinXP laptop will pick up the job of running music hardware editor/librarian/etc. programs. Right now all my XP computers are working just great and I still occasionally do some writing/recording with Sonar 7 or Reason on the Dell.

 

The other day I had to help with the woman's Compaq laptop running Vista and it's just an unbelievably clumsy OS IMO.

 

Mac's OS10.6 is still a frustration, fortunately I never put it on my main MacBookPro.

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I can't stand it. It has done nothing but piss me off. :)

 

The wife's new laptop has it and it has done nothing but annoy me. I have Vista on her previous laptop and haven't had any issues.

 

The main question I have is does XP mode for 7 actually work? I have all this legacy software that won't run on 7 and I'd update to Win7 (pro or whatever) for XP mode, but only if I know it works.

 

Everything I read advised against a dual boot with XP and 7, but that's just what I read.

 

Any more info would be greatly appreciated.

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The main question I have is does XP mode for 7 actually work? I have all this legacy software that won't run on 7 and I'd update to Win7 (pro or whatever) for XP mode, but only if I know it works..

 

 

 

There have indeed been two or three little programs that I've had to set to RUN UNDER VISTA mode under Compatibilities.

 

Indeed, there was one program which wouldn't start unless I configured it to RUN AS XP SERVICE PACK 2.

 

Both of these were small, minor auxiliary programs I just happened to like from yesteryear. They were not one of my "biggies" like PHOTOSHOP or SONAR.

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I can't stand it. It has done nothing but piss me off.
:)

The wife's new laptop has it and it has done nothing but annoy me. I have Vista on her previous laptop and haven't had any issues.


The main question I have is does XP mode for 7 actually work? I have all this legacy software that won't run on 7 and I'd update to Win7 (pro or whatever) for XP mode, but only if I know it works.


Everything I read advised against a dual boot with XP and 7, but that's just what I read.


Any more info would be greatly appreciated.

 

 

Geewhillikers.....lotza folks do the dual boot thing. I wonder why the people you've read advise against the dual boot? Maybe it's this - booting up two OS off of the SAME hard drive - that's probably a bad idea. I have a tower with XP on a totally separate HD from Win7. I've never owned a laptop, but most likely they are 1-hard drive computers unless you plug in a USB drive and can boot from it. But I'm not a laptop guru at all.

 

The "virtual XP" that Win 7 offers, according to what I read, takes a pretty big performance penalty. No surprise there. That's why I never bothered with that option, even assuming it works flawlessly. It is supposed to be there if you want it - I'd check out the MS website if I were in your situation as a starting point.

 

I have found the compatibility features in Win7 to be pretty effective, although not in every case. You might check into the Win7 options for flagging exe files to run in the various compatibility modes. I've done that a few times - always just a right-click and pick from the menu sort of operation - very easy.

 

nat whilk ii

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ras... I got news for ya... Vista has always sucked. :lol: It was always just a matter of time before it fell apart. That was the biggest abortion of an OS since Windows ME. :D

 

I have Win 7 64 on my laptop now and it's wayyyyyy better than Vista, and it has some cool features. Performance wise I haven't noticed it to be any better than XP or Linux. :idk: At least not on graphics heavy stuff - I haven't tried it for audio but I don't do anything terribly taxing on a DAW anyway. I'm sure it'll be fine.

 

So far I don't really see a whole lot of reason to upgrade my main desktop machine from XP, although supposedly all of my hardware has compatible 64-bit drivers. I'm slowly installing all the software from my desktop onto my laptop just to make sure it all runs. No problems so far. The only thing I've noticed is that Firefox seems to crash occasionally under W7, including the 32 bit version. Not sure what's up with that.

 

So, so far I like the OS, but I'm not gonna rave about it or anything, because I'm fully aware that it only really seems that great if you ever ran Vista. :lol: :lol: :lol:

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ras... I got news for ya... Vista has always sucked.
:lol:
It was always just a matter of time before it fell apart. That was the biggest abortion of an OS since Windows ME.
:D

 

 

Point taken, Lee! ;) Which leaves us all wondering; Why did MS release VISTA in the first place?

 

Surely its problems hadn't gone unnoticed upon its first release?

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Point taken, Lee!
;)
Which leaves us all wondering; Why did MS release VISTA in the first place?

 

They thought they could force people to "upgrade" in spite of it being a huge pile of suck. For a change, they didn't really get their way. Lots of people would not upgrade, and even hardware manufacturers such as HP and Dell gave in to customer demands and started giving customers the option to buy computers with XP pre-installed instead of Vista.

 

Surely its problems hadn't gone unnoticed upon its first release?

 

Of course. But they've never cared what their customers think, because their dominance of the market is so huge that they've always assumed people would buy their crap anyway.

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The main question I have is does XP mode for 7 actually work? I have all this legacy software that won't run on 7 and I'd update to Win7 (pro or whatever) for XP mode, but only if I know it works.


Everything I read advised against a dual boot with XP and 7, but that's just what I read.


Any more info would be greatly appreciated.

 

XP mode does work - but only if your CPU supports virtualization. Do you know what CPU you have?

 

I don't see any reason not to dual-boot if it solves your problem. I know people that have this setup and haven't heard of any troubles. Thankfully I haven't had any compatibiliy problems at all, so don't have first-hand experience dual-booting 7.

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Cool, thanks for the input. It's 64 bit and a good few of my favorite programs will not run.

 

The main thing that bothers me is that MS keeps changing certain things that we've been used to for a decade. I don't understand this need to keep changing what isn't broke. It's like they just rearrange everything just to jack with you.

 

If we've been used to a certain convention since like 3.1, why in the hell are you changing it?!

 

And as mentioned, why is it we keep getting faster machines with more ram that still run the same speed? Because windoze is eating up the {censored} {censored} faster than we can get to it.

 

I think they should be forced by a court of law to still offer XP and provide security updates, if even for a price. It's a stable, no frills system (by current standards) that just works. :)

 

I just think it's a shame that MS is able to just make decades worth of hardware/software obsolete by doing their updates the way they do.

 

Not to mention, I think it's a stupid business decision. They could still be selling copies of XP for I'm sure a good few years to come.

 

In fact, since it became the standard for as long as it did, perhaps that would be the solution...force XP into the open source domain. Like an expiring copyright or patent, it would provide continued support for legacy systems, and I'm sure there would still be people developing with it.

 

Imagine if XP was open source and was used by developers for the new wave of handheld computing?

 

I never was much of a MS basher, but I am now. I've been abused and annoyed enough.

 

All I want to do is play Sim City 3000. :(

 

;)

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I still haven't got the whole Vista bashing thing yet. I did notice a few annoying instances of something getting moved somewhere else, but all I could really see was a bunch of fancy CPU sucking fluff that was completely unnecessary. None the less, I just turned it all off and it's screamin'. I'm using it right now and I love it.

 

I think everybody just likes 7 because it's trying to look like a Mac. Eating up Moore's Law like a disposal. ;)

 

What's the bench tests look like between a dual core with XP64bit vs win7 64bit?

 

http://www.testfreaks.com/blog/information/windows-xp-vs-vista-vs-7/

 

http://www.maximumpc.com/article/reviews/windows_7_review

 

The bottom line is, when I get an OS update...I don't want to have to learn a whole new paradigm. Good grief, every damn time, you have to completely re-learn where everything is at. That {censored} just burns me from the get go. I'm sure I'll be doing some video at some point on the win7 laptop and be getting my jollies, but I sure as hell am not going to enjoy all the cussing I do to get there. (In addition to buying some software that will work.)

 

The one review has some comment with some guy with a quad core running 12 gigs of ram. Wow. I could see that being quite quick at video rendering.

 

So, if I have any questions and I'm sure I will, you guys with your Win7 pseudo-macs can tell me where the folder show by file type command is. :mad:

 

Why the hell didn't they just call it iWin? :lol:

 

:)

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