Bits Microsoft Windows 7 Review

W7 is a very very nice upgrade from XP. I never used Vista or ever even thought about it to be honest but from what I hear the upgrade experience is less noticeable but still rather large.
When it comes to gaming performance, in certain games W7 is indeed a lot faster than XP (Farcry 2, Crysis, HL2 /w fakefactory cinematic mod), however i'm finding a few games that are massively underperforming compared to XP such as DoW2 which really really sucks as that's the game I really wanted to get all DX10 about.
The aero flip 3d is nice and smooth with no cpu lag regardless of how many apps are running. The sidebar, although refined, eats memory like nobodies business and I wouldn't recommend using it at all.
Overall though, i'm very very happy with my upgrade.

 

LOL so you're thinking the same as I do then The Quick Launch is one feature in XP that I can't live without and with Windows 7 get rid of it, it makes me sad T_T. When I open up a program in XP, I always do it from Quick Launch, I rarely run it from the Start Menu because I think Start Menu is too crowded. Now with no Quick Launch in Win 7, I don't know if I would migrate to Win 7

And about the Quick Launch taking up a lot of taskbar space, I'd say that is simply incorrect because everyone knows that it can be resized to a minimum of 3 visible icons + an expand arrow beside it. My Quick Launch width is only 2 cm here and the whole taskbar width is 30 cm (1280x800 res in a 14" LCD), so I don't know how can it be said to takes up a lot of taskbar space? IMO, the SysTray area is usually the one which takes up a lot of taskbar space, even if you already enable the "Hide inactive icons" feature.

When I read that comment of yours, there's only 1 thing that comes up to mind, which is........ Apple! They even lock their own BIOS for God's sake LOL.

 

Ah, didn't know that. Thanks

 

Working fine for me.

 

For me, where I have a fair number of regularly used applications, it's actually two clicks to get to most of them using Quick Launch because it takes up space. Quick Launch also grows quite quickly if you don't manage it - I often don't have time to keep my applications/shortcuts tidy - my desktop is full of crap, which is why I turn off icons unless I actually need something that I know is on there.

I actually found myself leaving many of my applications open to achieve the same thing subconciously (while nomming all the RAM) and also stacked them in my Start Menu in the sticky area at the top under Email/Web for launching because I found them easier to get to there. Quick Launch just wasn't useful to me, but I know that several of you have said you did like it.

With Windows 7, it's one click to get to any of those regularly used applications, regardless of whether they're open or not, because I've pinned them in a line across the taskbar. It's actually useful because those appliations open in the same place on the taskbar every time I run them, so accessing them is, quite literally, second nature.

 

Meant the UI, unless they updated it with the Win7 visual styles?

 

A bit like the dock in OS X - which is good. The more ideas cross-pollinate between the three main OS's, the better each one becomes.

I'm hoping some Windows 7 ideas like the drag-to-edge to half-maximise a window, and easier networking make it across the OS divide, maybe in time for OS X 10.7.

 

windows 7 will run mostly happy on 512mb of ram (in an laptop) the pc was still useable and web sites still loaded in good time (i going to have an little bit more of an play with it as i do not use that one i sold the 2gb of ram that was in it but it did boot right to the desktop with the built in 512mb of ram that is in the laptop and opened IE quite fast)

 

Yes they have.

 

i meant to say 4gb+ but you do make a fair point, i have a aspire one (1.6 atom) and will continue to run XP on that as i do little more than browse the web and play music on it.

 

For those people with a Windows 7 ISO and want to boot off USB to install, Microsoft have a tool to make a bootable USB copy - http://store.microsoft.com/Help/ISO-Tool - very handy! Now no more fussing around with boot files etc.

It also makes creating a bootable DVD from the ISO incredibly simple.

 

I'd be interested to know users performance opinions relating to design app such as CS3 Creative Suite (PS, INDD, IL) video editing and 3d on W7 compared to XP.