Author Topic: windows 7 beta available for free Jan 9 (!) (Read 144,006 times)

40hz · « **Reply #125 on:** January 13, 2009, 12:28 AM »

I am deliberately running Windows 7 on an older machine that couldn't adequately handle Vista to get a better idea of how W7 stacks up.

Quote

ComponentDetails

Score Component
------ -----------
4.1 Processor
4.1 Memory (RAM)
2.0 Graphics
3.0 Gaming graphics
2.0 Primary hard disk

------------------------------------------------

AMD Athlon(tm) 64 Processor 3500+ 1.50GB RAM
NVIDIA GeForce 6100 (Prerelease - WDDM 1.0)
575 MB Total available graphics memory
45GB Free (58GB Total)

Finishing up Day-1 with the little beastie. Office 2k7 works just fine, as does Firefox 3.0.5. Interface is almost snappy despite the fact that I have a very poor Windows performance score.

I was happy to see an earlier problem I had with Windows Explorer closing and restarting every time I changed my desktop theme seems to have been corrected with an online driver update through the Device Manager. Pretty cool.

Zero3K · « **Reply #126 on:** January 13, 2009, 12:44 AM »

Quote from: f0dder on January 12, 2009, 06:38 AM

Are you sure it has anything to do with recovery? It sure doesn't look that way to me... (see attachment in previous post)

WinRE is installed in \Recovery\RANDOMNUMBERS

f0dder · « **Reply #127 on:** January 13, 2009, 12:47 AM »

Quote from: Zero3K on January 13, 2009, 12:44 AM

Quote from: f0dder on January 12, 2009, 06:38 AM
Are you sure it has anything to do with recovery? It sure doesn't look that way to me... (see attachment in previous post)
WinRE is installed in \Recovery\RANDOMNUMBERS

...which isn't present on the BCD volume Win7 created on my install, but is present in %SYSTEMDRIVE% (ie., C:, where the rest of the Win7 files go).

justice · « **Reply #128 on:** January 13, 2009, 01:17 AM »

are games any faster?

Darwin · « **Reply #129 on:** January 13, 2009, 01:44 AM »

Thanks, everyone, for your suggestions re: installing Windows 7 64-bit as a guest OS on a virtual machine. In the end, I elected to simply download the 32-bit version and get on with my life

It installed quite quickly. I assigned a gig of RAM to it and it's rather sluggish compared to Vista on 4 gig and XP on 2, but what does on expect?! I'm pretty pleased with the overall fit and finish, but rather nonplussed overall - it really does feel more like a new Vista theme than anything else. Having said that, I've not done more than open up the new Paint for a look, so early days yet. Will look more carefully at it over the coming week and post some impressions.

f0dder · « **Reply #130 on:** January 13, 2009, 02:04 AM »

Quote from: Darwin on January 13, 2009, 01:44 AM

It installed quite quickly. I assigned a gig of RAM to it and it's rather sluggish compared to Vista on 4 gig and XP on 2, but what does on expect?!

Is that using VirtualPC? It's quite snappy being assigned 1gig running under vmware...

Deozaan · « **Reply #131 on:** January 13, 2009, 02:08 AM »

Quote from: f0dder on January 13, 2009, 02:04 AM

Quote from: Darwin on January 13, 2009, 01:44 AM
It installed quite quickly. I assigned a gig of RAM to it and it's rather sluggish compared to Vista on 4 gig and XP on 2, but what does on expect?!
Is that using VirtualPC? It's quite snappy being assigned 1gig running under vmware...

It's very sluggish (to say the least) using VirtualPC on my 1GB RAM VM...

Carol Haynes · « **Reply #132 on:** January 13, 2009, 02:42 AM »

I have to agree - in VMWare (with 1Gb of memory) it is probably as fast as Windows XP, maybe a bit better.

Darwin · « **Reply #133 on:** January 13, 2009, 03:08 AM »

Yes - I"m running Windows 7 in Virtual PC. Seeing these last few posts prompted me to return to Virtual PC and take a look. I'd probably stop short of calling it sluggish, per se, but it's noticably slower than my "real" XP and Vista installs, both of which have a LOT more RAM to work with.

40hz · « **Reply #134 on:** January 13, 2009, 08:47 PM »

Now that the beta is out, I was wondering if it would make more sense to shift the discussion over to WINDOWS 7 THREAD (ongoing) or possibly starting a new topic called something like: I'm Running Windows 7 Beta?

http://www.donationcoder.com/forum/index.php?topic=15107.0

Darwin · « **Reply #135 on:** January 13, 2009, 10:03 PM »

Good thought, 40hz

I'd probably vote for a new topic dedicated to discussing using the beta...

f0dder · « **Reply #136 on:** January 14, 2009, 12:58 AM »

Quote from: Darwin on January 13, 2009, 03:08 AM

Yes - I"m running Windows 7 in Virtual PC. Seeing these last few posts prompted me to return to Virtual PC and take a look. I'd probably stop short of calling it sluggish, per se, but it's noticably slower than my "real" XP and Vista installs, both of which have a LOT more RAM to work with.

Switch to a better VM application, then

majorspacecase · « **Reply #137 on:** January 14, 2009, 01:50 AM »

Well I tried it out this weekend using VirtualBox. Other than a problem with 'network connection' (fixed by changing the adapter setting) and not having full access to my graphic card, it ran fairly well if a little sluggishly. Had RAM set at 800MB.

But today I bit the bullet and decided to set a dual boot with XP and Windows 7 (don't have and don't want Vista) . Used gparted to create a new 30GB partition on my secondary drive. Burned the Windows 7 ISO to a DVD using Imgburn and did a clean install.

Processor Intel(R) Celeron(R) CPU 420 @ 1.60GHz
Memory (RAM) 2.00 GB
Graphics NVIDIA GeForce 8400 GS 512MB

Install and updates took around half an hour. Have just finished the Driver installs for all my peripherals:
Logitech M518 Optical Gaming mouse (with uberOptions for SetPoint)
Wacom Graphire 3 tablet
Nostromo n52

All installed no problems. Am writing this post from W7 using Firefox 3. Will be spending the rest of the evening playing around and installing a few more essential apps. But so far I'm pleasantly surprised.

Add my vote for a dedicated W7 user experience thread.

Darwin · « **Reply #138 on:** January 14, 2009, 02:07 AM »

Quote from: f0dder on January 14, 2009, 12:58 AM

Quote from: Darwin on January 13, 2009, 03:08 AM
Yes - I"m running Windows 7 in Virtual PC. Seeing these last few posts prompted me to return to Virtual PC and take a look. I'd probably stop short of calling it sluggish, per se, but it's noticably slower than my "real" XP and Vista installs, both of which have a LOT more RAM to work with.
Switch to a better VM application, then

No doubt! However, I'm skint and not about to spend any money on a more robust solution (the free ones that people have tried - VirtualPC and VirtualBox seem to have the same problems...). I guess I could try the VMWare cocktail suggested earlier... All told, though, I'm not sure I can be bothered just now - if I get the urge to play with Win 7 I'm just going to install it and take advantage of my hardware!

majorspacecase · « **Reply #139 on:** January 14, 2009, 05:46 PM »

For those interested here's a list of windows 7 keyboard shortcuts.

Deozaan · « **Reply #140 on:** January 14, 2009, 06:57 PM »

Quote from: majorspacecase on January 14, 2009, 05:46 PM

For those interested here's a list of windows 7 keyboard shortcuts.

Thanks! That's useful.

Edvard · « **Reply #141 on:** January 14, 2009, 07:53 PM »

Has anybody tried to nlite this? I was dismayed to realize that after a 2.5 Gig download, I suddenly came to the brilliant conclusion that I would have to burn this on a DVD not a CD.

I guess what I'm asking is if the ISO is really that contrapulated or is there a bunch of cruft that can be stripped out to get it down to CD size?

40hz · « **Reply #142 on:** January 14, 2009, 09:25 PM »

Quote from: Edvard on January 14, 2009, 07:53 PM

Has anybody tried to nlite this? I was dismayed to realize that after a 2.5 Gig download, I suddenly came to the brilliant conclusion that I would have to burn this on a DVD not a CD.

I guess what I'm asking is if the ISO is really that contrapulated or is there a bunch of cruft that can be stripped out to get it down to CD size?

Ooooo! Now that's a thought. I'll have to give that a spin since I seem to recall reading somewhere that vLite is supposed to work with Win7.

(I also wouldn't be surprised if Microsoft left a lot of debug code in the beta since it is a beta. If so, vLite won't be able to do much about that.)

40hz · « **Reply #143 on:** January 14, 2009, 09:50 PM »

Interesting post up on gHacks.

http://www.downloadsquad.com/2009/01/14/turn-any-usb-flash-drive-or-hdd-into-a-bootable-windows-7-instal/

Quote

Turn any USB flash drive or HDD into a bootable Windows 7 installer

This little gem managed to slip through the cracks, but now that you've all had a chance to get your hands on the Windows 7 beta iso, it's definitely worth sharing.

In November Long Zheng - all around smartypants and good guy - released a handy tutorial on turning the PDC hard drive that Windows 7 was being distributed on at the time into a bootable installer. As luck would have it, he discovered that the process works with any old drive.

It's a pretty simple procedure. Create an active partition on your USB drive if there's not one there already. Mount your Windows 7 iso with a utility like Daemon Tools Lite, and copy the complete contents of the "disc" onto your drive. That's it. Reboot and force your PC to boot to the USB device, and you should be ready to install.

You should be able to pull the same thing off with Vista as well by following the same steps.

Here's the direct link to Long Zheng's how-to mentioned in the above article:

http://www.istartedsomething.com/20081104/tip-make-your-pdc-2008-usb-hard-drive-a-bootable-windows-7-install-disk/

f0dder · « **Reply #144 on:** January 14, 2009, 11:10 PM »

40Hz: how on earth is that going to work if you having installed a bootsector on the USB device? Formatting doesn't do that by default...

Would be interesting trying to vLite Win7 - might be possible since it's based on Vista. It already has a lower install footprint than a standard Vista install, though.

Edvard · « **Reply #145 on:** January 15, 2009, 01:16 AM »

GAH!!
2.5 Gig Win7 download
1.4 Meg vLite download
1.34 Gig Microsoft WAIK download (required by vLite)

This had better turn out a less-than-700-Megabyte install iso or I'm gonna be upset...

40hz · « **Reply #146 on:** January 15, 2009, 05:17 AM »

Quote from: Edvard on January 15, 2009, 01:16 AM

GAH!!
2.5 Gig Win7 download
1.4 Meg vLite download
1.34 Gig Microsoft WAIK download (required by vLite)

This had better turn out a less-than-700-Megabyte install iso or I'm gonna be upset...

My sentiments exactly. It's the 1.34Gb WAIK download that prompted me to say "Shag this!"

I'm curious...but I'm not that curious.

Quote from: f0dder on January 14, 2009, 11:10 PM

40Hz: how on earth is that going to work if you having installed a bootsector on the USB device? Formatting doesn't do that by default...

I agree. From the look of the how-to, the formatting was done under Win7. I suspect that a boot sector gets written to the drive when you select the new "Mark Partition as Active" option under the Drive Manager.

Looks like they added some features from the old fdisk command to the Disk Management snap-in.

f0dder · « **Reply #147 on:** January 15, 2009, 06:21 AM »

It sucks that you have to download WAIK to use vLite - I'm pretty sure it's only one or two DLL files it needs from that package (or something similar). nuhi probably did it this way to avoid getting into redistribution trouble with Microsoft... I'm attaching the files I think are necessary here, try unpacking them to your vLite install folder. I hope it's not a problem posting them here, honestly I can't see the problem in doing so - but moderators, feel free to remove if you don't approve.

Wrt. bootsector getting installed if you mark partition as active, that sounds reasonable.

40hz · « **Reply #148 on:** January 15, 2009, 07:06 AM »

Quote from: f0dder on January 15, 2009, 06:21 AM

It sucks that you have to download WAIK to use vLite - I'm pretty sure it's only one or two DLL files it needs from that package (or something similar). nuhi probably did it this way to avoid getting into redistribution trouble with Microsoft... I'm attaching the files I think are necessary here, try unpacking them to your vLite install folder.

Thanks f0dder! That did the trick.

1. Drop wimfltr, wimfltr.sys, and wimgapi.dll into the vLite root folder.

2. Right click on wimfltr (i.e. setup info file) and select Install

Next time you open vLite it's ready to go.

---------

Well...it's 2:05AM where I'm sitting, so I'm gonna call it a day and give vLite a shot tomorrow. I'll post how it worked out when I do.

'Night...

Edvard · « **Reply #149 on:** January 15, 2009, 05:25 PM »

w00t!!
Worked fine.
Mounted the DVD iso with MagicISO.
vLite grinding away...