Windows 7

[janneman]

Anybody noticed any differences in boot-up speed between W7 and XP?

Jan Didden

[johngalt47]

In my case it is hard to say because of the length of time I have been using this installation of XP, but I would say it is about the same.

[riktw]

i installed windows XP and W7 in a virual machine, both the same specs.
both norman antivirus and spybot anti spyware.
i added firefox to the bootfile, and opened XP, waiting for firefox to show up.
took 49 seconds
windows 7 51 seconds.
so its a small difference.

both 2048 MB ram and 2 cores, in VMware.

[5th element]

Originally Posted by janneman

Anybody noticed any differences in boot-up speed between W7 and XP?

Jan Didden

It's faster for me and that's using an old IDE HD to boot off, compared to my XP machine that was on SATA. Both 7200rpm. I am using the 64 bit version.

With regards to features over XP, there are a few things that I like. I've not used vista so don't know if these were included there too.

First of all the interface scaling is now all handled by one direct control that affects everything. This means you can set the screen resolution to any thing you want and make everything look the same size simply by moving one slider. You can also alter the text size independently of this if you wish.

On the start menu where it displays your most frequently loaded programs, if those programs are used to open files, such as Foxit, Open Office etc they come with a sub menu that shows you all the recently loaded files by said program.

The task bar and quick launch have sort of been combined into one and a picture is worth a thousand words in this case.

The quick launch buttons I've got there are Firefox, Foobar, Windows MP Classic and Maginifier tool. The programs I've got open are MSN Eagle and Ultiboard.

Notice that the area surrounding the icons is different. The surround around firefox shows that the program is active and I'm switched to it. The surround around Eagle shows the program is active but not switched to. The one around MSN means something new with the program has occured, IE someone has sent me a message and is trying to talk to me.

If I hover my mouse over the MSN icon it will show me a small popup of all the windows open within MSN, IE it will show me a small preview of all the active conversations. If I then move my mouse cursor over one of the previews it will change to full screen, allowing me to view it, but it doesn't switch to it, if I move my mouse away from it, I go back to the original program, in this case firefox.

Of the other quick launch buttons, Windows Media Player Classic for example. If I right click on the icon it will bring up a list of the recent files that program has loaded.

Then there's the magnifier tool. I find this very useful as I sit almost 1 meter away from the screen. When loaded you get a tiny window as shown in my second screen cap. The zoom buttons are self explanatory and to move the image all you do is move your mouse pointer to the sides of the screen, much the same as if you were playing an RTS game.

In the third screen shot you will see how my start bar looks, that's the default that come with windows7, the colour scheme however is not. Above the profile image to the top right of the start bar you will see a translucent image of a magnifying glass. This is what the magnifier tool reduces too if you leave it alone for a moment, so it doesn't obscure what's on the screen.

Those are the few things I've noticed about W7 over XP that I regularly use and think are better. Nothing, I might add is worse then XP which is saying something. Suffice it to say W7 has never crashed on me and I've left it running for over a week once without a shutdown. Every program I've tried so far has also worked, this includes a variety of CAD programs and games.

I'm quite impressed by it.

Amazon has pre orders for W7 home premium I think for under £70.

One thing to mention is the installation size. W7 64 bit takes up 20 gigs which is quite a considerable increase compared to XP x32.

[woody]

I have tried the trial version on 2 computers and realy like it. I ran the
check to see if it would run on my computers one computer passed
the other one failed because of a vidio card that wasn't good enough.
I was still able to install it to the computer with the inferior vidio card
but the speed suffers.