windows 7 - this is what it should have been!

[daniel.azy]

have been using windows 7 7057 for slightly over a week now, upgraded from windows xp sp3. windows 7 detected everything, webcam, card reader. only the VIA graphics needed a internet update which was done automatically too.

the new graphical bells and whistles is refreshing from xp, windows 7 finally makes me happy just fooling around with the desktop and menus, everything looks sleek, shiny and pretty.

that apart, performance on windows 7 with the 2133 (1.2ghz, 2gb ram) is surprisingly snappy. i would say that it's at least as fast for me as on XP. XP took about 2 minutes to boot (tweakxp, rocketdock, windowsblinds) after i configured the way i wanted it to.

With windows 7, the OS is aesthetically pleasing enough for me to not need to install any tweaks, superbar works well which means i don't need a dock replacement. boot time is consistently just over a minute. and that means a USABLE desktop, no post-loading or hourglass icon appearing.

resolution wise, windows 7 manages to fit more onto the screen. at 135% font size, i don't get any cut off menu options or text which i did in xp, might be a feature native to the vista/windows 7 os. i'm happy with that so far.

Media Software :
ditched itunes in favour of mediamonkey + last.fm - these 2 work a treat, with mediamonkey giving a memory footprint of 30mb for a 10000+ playlist library. very much wanted to try songbird, but it kept giving a core engine error and i couldn't figure out what's wrong. when/if it gets fixed i think songbird will be the ultimate music jukebox replacement.

MPC stutters alot, no idea why.

GOM Player works well, as it did with XP.

VLC works surprisingly well, smoother than it did in XP. it's become my default video player right now.

Productivity Software :

office 2007 works smoothly as well, loading fairly quickly and always responsive enough for word processing.

Openoffice works good too, but i needed the OneNote application and the notes preview pane of Powerpoint which Openoffice didn't have, hence i dropped it in favour of Microsoft's offering.

Antivirus :

AVG hung my system constantly with it's background scanning, 100% cpu use for a good 10 minutes. seems to come and go, no idea why so i deleted it.

Found instead Avira which is incredibly small on memory usage, and it works even more discreetly than AVG. My main antivirus for its frills-free approach.

IM clients :

Trillian works good, as does Pidgin. Just recently switched to Digsby for it's facebook integration and also for it's notification popups ala Growl on Adium. liking it so far so good.

Web Browsers :

no issue with firefox, chrome or safari. safari does run slow though when viewing flash-heavy pages.
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battery life remained constant for me at slightly over 4 hours with a 6 cell battery, 40% brightness with wifi. no CPU down throttling, constant 1.2ghz

all in all, windows 7 is the first time in many years where i felt like it's my preferred choice of OS, rather than settling for it because another OS would break other components in the laptop. from my point of view of an average consumer, windows 7 is definitely a step in the right direction. it's incredibly stable, everything just works out of the box, especially so on dated hardware like the 2133.

try it now if you haven't already done so, you might be as pleased as i was.

[daniel.azy]

just an update, the sleep function on windows 7 is much more power efficient. i put the 2133 to sleep for 5 hours (was 100% fully charged then). when i turned it on 5 hours later, battery charge was still 100%, at 40% brightness battery calibration calculation was 4h 20min of use.

on win xp sp3, the 2133 chewed approx 1.5% of battery life every hour of sleep. seems like sleep on windows7 has very little battery effect, if i didn't know better i would say it went into hibernate if not for the flashing blue light indicator.

another reason to make the switch!

[nogoodnick]

Ha, you converted for all those features. Me, I converted six times over for the pictures. ;D

[Joppu]

MPC stutters alot, no idea why.

GOM Player works well, as it did with XP.

VLC works surprisingly well, smoother than it did in XP. it's become my default video player right now.

You might want to try Mplayer for video playback, since it works the smoothest for me from any other player I tried, VLC, MPC. Remeber to enable the "disable h264 inblocking filtering" in the installation to get extra fast h264 playback

[daniel.azy]

[/quote]

You might want to try Mplayer for video playback, since it works the smoothest for me from any other player I tried, VLC, MPC. Remeber to enable the "disable h264 inblocking filtering" in the installation to get extra fast h264 playback[/quote]

vlc now does have some stuttering with h264 files, kudos for the heads up!

[baius]

Thank you for this thread. I've just installed a test version of Windows 7 on a very old HP TC1100 to try it out. Was going to try that for a bit, then, all being well, buy a copy of Win7 in October for the 2133.

You have saved me a lot of trouble. You mentioned a lot of programs I use frequently as well, so thanks for that.

I'm also pleased that driver support seems to be good.

Thank you again.