yes and yes

I am using a atheros n card in a laptop though, I don't put allot of faith in this companies driver support. I do find that my connection to my linksys 310n router is allot more reliable than my connection to my d-link di-624 54g router though.

No idea if vista drivers will help.

 

Vista x64 drivers should work just fine.

XP drivers work too in some cases (this applies to both 32 bit and 64 bit)

 

^I was showing my friend (who's a girl that is decently computer literate) Win 7 and she seemed to like it. She thought the Aero Peek and Aero snaps feature were really cool. As soon as she sat down with it she started snapping windows to the sides of the screen and I'm like why are you doing that you don't need to do that right now, she's like "IDK it's fun!" then when I told her about the desktop background can be rotated automatically she got reall excited cause she's taken some good pics of Paris and would love to have them change all the time.

She wants to buy this desktop with Win 7 off of me but it needs to run Office XP and the wifi problem needs to be fixed.

 

Yeah I put 7 on my fiancee's computer, she likes how the backgrounds rotate too. We have a lot of pictures of our dog. She also likes how the gadgets can be placed just about anywhere.

Seems like M$ actually took the constructive criticism of Vista to heart.

 

Seriously though, that stuff your friend liked is gadgety tweaks. Those are fine and dandy to place as priorities for the OS choice on a new machine. But c'mon, you're telling me that aero snaps and rotating desktop backgrounds are worth the effort to wipe a functioning Vista machine and install an new OS? I don't think so.

 

If you want to remove the "evaluation copy" watermark on the lower right..

http://www.mydigitallife.info/2009/0...de-on-desktop/

At the bottom it also has a link to remove the "send feedback" at the top of various explorer screens

 

I'm fully working now inWin 7 on my 64 bit 2.8Ghz laptop.

So far so good, the only thing I've lost was my on screen MediaSmart.. On my HP as I glide my hand over, it does change volume, bass, treble..etc...but I do not get a confirmation on the screen. HP does not have MediaSmart available for download. I've cheated, and used the Recovery Drive, and yet it does not like Windows 7, it freezes.

 

Agree, my main reason for change from XP to Win 7 is the better integration of networking, especially homegroup, and of course the much improved interface for customization, a great thing for an IT Pro. Now I will test it fully with everything I use, and then I may switch permanently.

 

IDK that's the shit that makes people want to get a mac

 

and most people aren't upgrading from Vista they're upgrading from Xp and this is a huge improvement over XP. Not to mention it's faster in virtually every aspect and has better battery life.

 

Average user, No. Me yes. It is faster, behaves much better, and from the playing I have done mutitasks better.

 

Ok a few more questions:

- If I want to install multiple copies of Windows 7, can I use the same key over and over? Like in a VM, on my desktop, on my laptop etc. Is it one key per Windows Live ID or do you need to go back and get more keys?

- I heard of the snap features but what's aero peek?

- What's the background rotation do?

 

I know the first one It usually is 3 machines (I know my MSDN provided key is up to 10) The other key I will get will be up to 1500.

 

good to hear!!

 

I definitely noticed the battery life has improved on my laptop. I've spend good 4 hours playing and installing my software.

Believe it or not I still haven't played with the aesthetic of windows, snap to edge, rotating background... Never cared for eye-candy. I wanted a faster and more stable OS.... I think Win 7 is a good start. (The funniest thing that is still Vista's kernel, just much much better coded. B+ for Microsoft)

 

That's the sort of good news I was looking for.

Quite true and I indeed did ask why one would upgrade a Vista machine. If you think about it though, most of the same principles that would theoretically motivate someone to upgrade a Vista machine could probably also be applied to those people who specifically avoided Vista because it didn't really buy them anything over XP. There's certainly a whole hell of a lot of people (well, users at companies) that are in that boat.

 

I'm finally downloading the beta. It wouldn't download on my Mac (I'll be running it in a VM), it couldn't download on FireFox on XP, so I finally had to use IE to download it. Annoying, but at least it's finally downloading.

 

You can choose a bunch of pictures and then set an interval and Windows will automatically change the background pic for you.

Aero Peek is where the open windows turn to glass and you can see right through them. So if you have 5 open windows on your desktop and you want to peek at one of your gadgets floating on the desktop you just take your cursor to the lower right corner and turn all windows to glass and shows you the desktop. this works on all other windows too.

Here's two pics that demonstrate the before and after of Aero peek using that little desktop preview thing in the lower right corner.



And these two show how to use aero peek with an application window




Also if you have all these windows open and you want to minimize all of them except the one you're working on, you just grab the window you want to keep at it's title bar and shake it like a salt shaker and that will minimize all other open windows.

 

^ You see that little preview box you are getting of your firefox.. I don't get that, I just get a breakdown of the title that's open..

Teach the noob.

 

They went to the ribbon interface for the canned apps that come with the OS?

 

The who for the what?

 

Yep. Attempt at a smarter quick launch.

 

What? Screenshot please? I'm not doing anything except hovering over top of the FF icon, there's no trick.

 

Smarter Quick Launch? We may be talking about two different things. In the screenshot Doucher posted above, the Paint application has the same ribbon interface that was introduced with Office 2007. On the one hand, user interface consistency is a good thing. On the other hand, I can't tell you how many deer-in-the-headlights looks I've received when showing Office 2007 to average users at work. If the ribbon application interface is even moderately pervasive in Windows 7, that's going to be a pretty damn tall hurdle for deploying it in my organization. I'm starting to foresee myself writing an "everyone needs to just stop bitching and step up to the plate" position paper before the end of Q1.

 

yup just word pad and paint. I like the ribbon

 

I have to say, it would be nice if they included a "classic menu" option in both Office 2007 and whatever new apps will use the ribbon interface. I am not a fan, and not through lack of use, just ease of use (Office).

 

I like Office 2007. I think once you get the ribbon down in Office it'd be easy to use paint and word pad, but really do your employees use paint and word pad?

 

Yeah, I like the ribbon interface as well and as long as it's just paint and notepad that are using it, then it's a non-issue as far as the OS is concerned.

OK, here's a question or two that may have already been answered. The machine I have at work that I'd want to test this on has two drives. The first drive (SATA 0 connection) is partitioned into a C: and a D:. I can't really move or rearrange anything on this drive. The second drive has gobs of available space I could use to install the beta.

A) Am I correct in assuming that I shouldn't have any problems installing the Win 7 beta into the unused space on my second (SATA 1 connection) physical drive?

B) If yes to above, am I correct in assuming that I'll still end up with the Win 7 beta boot loader on my first physical drive (SATA 0)?

What I'm concerned about is what's going to happen when the beta expires. The last thing I want to have happen is that I finish evaluating the Windows 7 beta, get rid of it, but then have to redo everything over again just to somehow update the boot loader to RTM code.

 

a) No, that is what I did on my home machine. and yes it will update the boot loader on disk 0.
You will just have to go into disk management and assign drive letters to the first 2 partitions if you want them seen by windows 7.

B) yes, but you can change the default option to be vista as the default boot. and it shouldn't matter because looking at what they did, it is just the vista boot loader anyway.

 

yeah that should work fine. my bootloader is still on my RAID 0 array that stored my Vista 32 bit OS but I haven't boot to that in 6 months and Win7 along with XP and Vista x64 or all on a seperate drive and they all appera in the bootloader on the RAID array.

 

Thanks for the advice. Of course, this potential play time hits just at the same time as a mountain of actual work landed on my desk. Such is life.

 

 

In regards to 2007 ribbon interface, I do not like it. I prefer the 2003 version. Robust yet affective.

Installing Win 7 is a breeze, you should not have a problem installing it in any unllocated space. I shrank my main drive, gave it 50 GB, and install Win 7 on it. As long as you install the older versions first you will have no problem. example Windows XP < Vista < Win 7, Linux is to be installed last.

 

does that mean YOU are installing it!!

 

Yup.

I'm trying to d/l the .iso, acutally. But it ust stopped/completed 600mb in... ugh.

I'll put it on a vm session and mess around.

 

My DL stops around 400MB. I got the ISO from Bittorrent and used the key from Microsoft.

 

*cough* flashget *cough*

 

Alright... If it stops again, I'll go that route.

 

11k/sec on BT. :ghey:

 

I'm just waiting for sarlacc to say he's downloading it