Swamp56 Posted October 4, 2009 Share Posted October 4, 2009 I downloaded and installed the RC version of Windows 7 to check it out. I heard amazing things about the stability, driver support, and speed of the operating system as a whole and I got sold on the idea of it being better than Vista (anything is). I installed Windows 7, and in 3 days, I had 25 blue screens @_@. Upon checking the minidump files of most of them, every single one of them was from something different, and I went through various stages of installing, uninstalling, and reinstalling almost every driver on my computer to no avail. All of my games started freezing at random points, my video software was crashing the computer, and the computer would start slowing down and blue screening when I opened up windows. It got to a point where I had to revert back to XP. While I will admit that Windows 7 is much faster and better with driver support (installed my printer w/o having to install a thing!), I kept having other driver issues that I couldn't resolve for the life of me. Anyone else have this problem? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
nalgas Posted October 4, 2009 Share Posted October 4, 2009 Nope. I have the RTM (slightly newer than the RC, but not a whole lot different), and aside from one or two things that haven't been updated to support it yet, just about everything works fine. I'm still fiddling with it to get everything set up at least tolerably (I disagree with some of the UI changes, like the start menu going from kind of stupid to totally unusable), and I could stand to disable some more unnecessary services to get it stripped down like my XP install was, but it runs just fine, even if I do sketchy things like use ugly hacks to get it to use an ATI card to drive the display while using an Nvidia card to do physics processing. The biggest problem has mostly been transferring all my settings and stuff over, because the migration tool turned out to be beyond useless for my situation, so I ended up having to move everything manually. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
celestia Posted October 4, 2009 Share Posted October 4, 2009 So, Nal, would you say it's better than Vista? My kid plans to upgrade when he gets his student loan monies. I don't mind Vista, in my amateur opinion, Windows 98 was better than any of the subsequent versions. I JUST became familiar with all of vista's eccentricities so I'm not in a hurry to upgrade. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
nalgas Posted October 4, 2009 Share Posted October 4, 2009 So, Nal, would you say it's better than Vista? My kid plans to upgrade when he gets his student loan monies. It pretty much is Vista, with a few of the stupid things fixed that they should've done right in the first place. Also, students can get the upgrade version for $30, if he doesn't already know. I don't mind Vista, in my amateur opinion, Windows 98 was better than any of the subsequent versions. I JUST became familiar with all of vista's eccentricities so I'm not in a hurry to upgrade. No. No, no, no, no, no. Win98 was better than any of the previous (consumer) versions, but that's not saying much at all, because they were all unusably bad. So was Win98, for that matter. The only more recent version that was worse than Win98 was WinME, which was downright abominable. As far as I'm concerned, none of them were even usable until Win2k/XP, which was when they finally abandoned the profoundly sketchy and ancient underpinnings of the earlier versions (although NT4, which those came out of, was fine at work for me, but a lot of consumer stuff (like games and random crap people expect to be able to use) didn't work so well on it, since that's not what it was for). I don't expect to ever acknowledge anything of theirs other than the NT line (NT4, 2k, XP, Vista, and 7, so far) as anything other than a dark time in computing history (which is not to say that the newer stuff is great, but it's at least not embarrassingly bad, and I don't feel nearly as dirty using it). Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Swamp56 Posted October 4, 2009 Author Share Posted October 4, 2009 Lol, ya, I tend to get all the rarest issues of anything. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
celestia Posted October 4, 2009 Share Posted October 4, 2009 I'm having no problems with Windows since I bought my iMac. The girl got her 1st Mac this year and she loves it, of course. I covet it. It really is the only computer to get, and particularly those of ya'll who do graphics arts of any kind. Her photos are stunning. They were before, but on this Mac I just look and drool. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Swamp56 Posted October 5, 2009 Author Share Posted October 5, 2009 I'm having no problems with Windows since I bought my iMac. The girl got her 1st Mac this year and she loves it, of course. I covet it. It really is the only computer to get, and particularly those of ya'll who do graphics arts of any kind. Her photos are stunning. They were before, but on this Mac I just look and drool. I'll never understand why people say one OS is better for one thing than the other...especially when there are so many programs available for each OS. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
nalgas Posted October 5, 2009 Share Posted October 5, 2009 I'll never understand why people say one OS is better for one thing than the other...especially when there are so many programs available for each OS. The more specific a niche you work in, the more likely it is that one platform is better than others, whether it's because of specific programs/tools that don't exist or have equivalents on other platforms, certain features in software and/or hardware are better supported, or the community has ended up for some reason or another picking one, making your life a lot easier if you use the same things they do. If your job consists of editing plain text files, there are dozens of options on any OS and hardware combination imaginable. If you do something that requires specific tools, though, whether it's your professional audio hardware or medical imaging software or a compiler for some obscure CPU architecture, sometimes there's a very substantial difference. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
celestia Posted October 5, 2009 Share Posted October 5, 2009 I agree Windows v. Mac isn't productive. I think it's definitely a matter of choice. As to the proper platform depending on what you need to do, I have found Macs more accessible, generally, but cost prohibitive for what I would NEED. Any gamer will tell you (right or wrong) that Macs suck for gaming. <shrug> Di, maybe it's because I was so used to seeing her stuff on my crappy laptop or hers. I would imagine a newer, high end PC would impress me too. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
nalgas Posted October 5, 2009 Share Posted October 5, 2009 Mac laptop screens do look better than Windows Depends entirely on the laptop. I guarantee you can get a non-Apple laptop that uses the exact same panel as any given MacBook. The difference may be that the ones at the low end of the price range that Apple doesn't offer anything in are crappier, but if you're not trying to get a $400 laptop and actually get something comparable, it's more...comparable. And as much as I like OS X and a good deal of Apple's hardware and use it for most stuff I do on my main computer, anyone who pretends that a Mac is remotely suitable (read: a good value if that's its primary use) for playing games much beyond something like Bejeweled is delusional. I do have a friend who plays games on a Mac Pro, but he reboots into Windows for it and runs OS X on it for everything else. My PC is dramatically faster for games than it, and it was maybe a quarter the price. I would go so far as to argue that if you don't mind fiddling around with WINE, you're better off playing games in Linux than on a Mac. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Swamp56 Posted October 5, 2009 Author Share Posted October 5, 2009 I'll never understand why people say one OS is better for one thing than the other...especially when there are so many programs available for each OS. The more specific a niche you work in, the more likely it is that one platform is better than others, whether it's because of specific programs/tools that don't exist or have equivalents on other platforms, certain features in software and/or hardware are better supported, or the community has ended up for some reason or another picking one, making your life a lot easier if you use the same things they do. If your job consists of editing plain text files, there are dozens of options on any OS and hardware combination imaginable. If you do something that requires specific tools, though, whether it's your professional audio hardware or medical imaging software or a compiler for some obscure CPU architecture, sometimes there's a very substantial difference. Ok, you got me with the medical imaging and audio hardware part. I guess I was thinking more along the lines of less professional things. A good example being that I do a lot of PHP programming using MySQL Databases as a hobby, and right now I'm working as the programmer in a rather large group of people developing a rather large website. Any operating system is basically functional for me on the same level. I can setup WAMP (the program) as well was WAMP (the configuration), MAMP (the program) and MAMP (the configuration) in Mac, and LAMP in Linux and be on my way. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
nalgas Posted October 5, 2009 Share Posted October 5, 2009 Dear sweet Jebus, using Windows as a server for that sort of thing still terrifies me (and I'm not much more enthusiastic about using OS X, either, for production stuff, at least, but it's fine with me for development). I mean, so does PHP itself for a lot of things, but that's another story... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Velvet Elvis Posted October 6, 2009 Share Posted October 6, 2009 Just out of curiosity I got Windows 7 running under VirtualBox on a Debian host. No problems but I haven't tried to use it for much. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Renegade Posted October 10, 2009 Share Posted October 10, 2009 When my present computer decides to go to computer heaven (which may not be very far off), I'm getting a Mac. I've had it with Windows. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
eternal_mystery Posted October 10, 2009 Share Posted October 10, 2009 My limited experience with Windows 7 has been fairly good with the main problems being finding drivers. On the OS issue, I'm a Linux fan and have been for awhile. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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