Be Excellent To Each Other

so, as a longtime macos user (since 95), not ever had a good functioning windows system, just xp citrix at work, and early things under emulators, but i must say it's quite nice, now i have windows 7 on bootcamp, and seems fun, even though it keeps wanting to make desktop shortcuts

call me surprised//

Windows 7 is what convinced me to abandon the Mac format. Admittedly, this is because it's blatantly stolen many ideas from Mac OS X, such as the new taskbar, which works uncannily like the OS X Dock. But still, I likes it.

Plus, some of Apple's UI choices have seemingly got crazier and less consistent with each new version of OS X.

well , i'm not quite that far (and just bought a new macbook, so i won't ), and http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/review ... view.ars/5
arstechnica points out a lot of reasons, but still, for a bit of steaming against you guys, and some apps (see other thread), it's pleasent to have an alternative...

Win 7 user here. I've had 99 problems and this bitch is Collecting data for crash dump ... Unless you have a fast PC with hardware in great condition and a PSU over 500 don't even bother, another issue with hardware is that windows 7 does not like anything too obscure or old or firefox. She's like a very expensive whore walking out the door because you bought her a milk tray rather than from Thorntons.

Gotta say I disagree with Decca almost entirely there. I've got a number of machines running Win7 on some pretty old hardware. It's much less resource-hungry than Vista, and seems about on a par with XP. Also, the OS doesn't give a crap about your PSU rating - if it's not supplying enough grunt to your hardware, stuff's going to start failing whatever OS you've got on it.

Sorry decca, but I agree with jolly old St Nick up there. Windows 7 runs well on an old p4 with 1gb of ddr for me at work. Sounds like you've been unlucky

Windows 7 is the version of Windows I dislike least. High praise, there. I wouldn't dump OS X for it though, and I'd be using Ubuntu here in work instead of it if they let me.

Win 7 and I are in the middle of a fight.


This doesn't include all the re-starts or failed starts while trying to coax the bitch into working without crashing.

I got this machine the beginning of november.

Yeah, that's not a Win7 problem, it's a hardware problem. Still a bit shit if it was sold to you like that though.

Aye. That's a Power Supply issue. It's not that it's underpowered... it's broken

But you knew that already

It kind of is a win 7 problem, as I said in the other thread it's very very twitchy when it comes to any slight hardware, memory or driver error, Vista would not go into an endless loop of crashing over this*. There is no "I know what the problem is and I'll fix as soon as this overclocker package turns up stop fucking crashing" option. Oh and for some reason on one of the crashes it decided to delete my registry back up files.


*Actually there is a really great win 7 feature where if you have vista on a second external hard drive, put in the win 7 install disk and get it to find problems it will then do some witchcraft and give you the option of booting from the vista HDD, which is how I'm able to type to you now. I do like win 7 btw, it is a great OS, but as I said it's sleeping on the sofa right now.

Well, to be clearer, if Mac OS X were an option on my computer without having to resort to arcane Hackintosh methods, I'd at the very least be dual-booting between that and Win 7. I still very much do love the Mac. But I play rather a lot of games on my machine now, so can't justify forking out for Mac hardware anymore and Windows 7 is good enough that I find I don't miss OS X that much.

If I had the cash, I'd probably grab a Mac Mini and a KVM switch so I could do worky stuff on the Mac and games playing on the PC, but I don't. I do occasionally still use my Powerbook G4, but bless it, it's well past it's prime nowadays. You can forget watching YouTube videos on it and the like.

Kernel-Power would be an excellent user name.

I really like Win7 - well, in as much as I care about operating systems - it works well, is pretty easy to use and the media sharing is very easy to set up. But then, I didn't think Vista was that bad either, and I've only used a couple of macs (at work).

Decca - seen this?

*twitch*
Yes.

My PC has decided that it likes pokemon BSOD and is desperatly trying to collect them all.
latest shenanigans caused by delivery guy clearly hurling my new PSU against a wall and/or piling everything else on top of it

I'm not sure I'd blame the delivery guy for that one mate, I mean, just look at it!

Indeed. "OCUK Swift 750W Silent Power Supply" it is not.

edit: lol just got the RMA e-mail

"Problem / Fault description: Faulty [Exploded],
Desired action: Replace"

I must say that PSU is one area I don't tend to go cheap on when building my own PC. I always go for a decent brand. When I use to work in a PC repair shop, I'd see an alarming number of hardware faults that could be traced to the shitty PSU being used.

Heh, one day a bloke came in with his PC and a little girl, perhaps no more than six years old. He tells me that the PC just won't power on, so the first thing I did was plug it in and push the power button. This caused the PSU to make a loud BANG! noise and a 15cm or so flame to shoot out of the back of it. On reflex, I jumped back and shouted "FUUUUUCK!".

Then it dawned on me that I'd just loudly sworn in front of a customer and his little daughter, so I hurriedly tried to apologise. He was very understanding, all things considered.

Only problem I have had with it is the odd bit of stuttery performance (usually when running flash) and usb issues. Basically sometimes when I boot my mouse is lit up but won't move (so I have to replug it, same on three mice in two different PCs) and my TV dongle sometimes displays a black screen until I replug it.

Other than that it's been very good.

our hunoeymoon is over..it's still windows..grr

Win7 is lovely apart from two problems:

1) It doesn't like my Motu Soundcard drivers very much; it goes funny requiring a reboot once in a while.

2) It doesn't like deleting stuff. I'm constantly being told I don't have admin rights to delete a file when I have full admin rights on this account?! I know it's something to do with files being loaded into memory in windows explorer or something, but why is this such a problem when it never happened in XP?! Annoying.

Having "full admin rights" doesn't actually mean that any.ore. You still won't be able to delete files on the root of c: without elevating credentials, for example.

The answer is to not be trying to delete files in places OS thinks you shouldn't.

Which appears is absolutely anywhere on any drive/partition in my system, including My Documents?!?! Tons of people are moaning about this online, I haven't found a solution though...

You've got a problem if it's flagging it in My Documents. Tried creating a new logon account and seeing if it has the same issue?

Before it went to laptop heaven, I got to like Windows 7 quite a lot. So I'm trying to put it on my desktop.
Installing a new OS is something I would consider trivial, but I'm not having much luck here, everytime I try to install it, I get to the Complete Install stage, and the screen goes black (when you'd expect it to boot to the desktop for the first time) and nothing happens (well, all the fans go crazy).

Googling suggests I should try the following:
Remove all USB devices - done
Remove all unnecessary hardware - done (unneccesary was deemed to be anything other than memory, monitor, keyboard, mouse. Quite what they expected me to install it to wasn't clear).
Try a different graphics card - er, no thanks.
Flash the bios on my graphics card - if I have to

Hardware is probably buried in an old thread on here somewhere, because I asked for advice a couple of years ago, but it's something like a Gigabyte ep45-ds3r, no idea about the cpu, XFX Geforce 9500 GT. All hard drives are Sata, but it seems to have no issues detecting them.
Running the hardware compatibility in XP suggested only my sound card would be an issue, but I have the same problem whether that's in or out.

Ideas please, I'm perhaps so rusty on desktops that I'm just doing something really stupid.

\
Go Joans go!

I'd probably guess at graphics card though.. have you got a spare one you can try?

I'm going to rip a PCI one out of someone elses pc and try that, but seriously, I need a PCI graphics card to install Windows 7?

Oh, I did try vga mode hoping that would fallback to something that might be compatible, and the XFX support site is as welcoming as Fort Knox.

I have Windows 7 on my macbook and it's a good decent OS from the little I've used. Very glad to have it around for a little bit of steam and indie games but I won't use it for work. Still reassuring to have it around in case of compatibility issues.

Really love the Windows "snapping" gestures.

This is getting depressing now.
I've found a new bios for my graphics card that "improves compatibility with newer drivers" - who thought that making drivers not compatible with the hardware they're suppsed to support was good idea, I don't know.
The read me gives no indication of how you're meant to flash it. I think I've flashed the bios of a graphics card once before and that was years ago. I get the feeling it's a windows job, but there's no OS onthe machine anymore, so I set about having fun trying to create a bootable dos USB stick.
Yes, it's a windows executable.
Attempt to reinstall XP, except that can't see any of my drives.
*sobs*

Edit - Oh hang on, I'd enabled AHCI in the bios, I just needed to turn it back off.

Service pack 1 is doing the rounds now.



NVFLASH for Windows.

http://www.techpowerup.com/downloads/se ... ?q=nvflash

After some googling, it appears I can ignore this and just work on the assumption that XFX are total buffoons.

Some companies will try and stop you from flashing other firmwares onto their cards.

The reason? Well, for example XFX usually make three cards that are all the same.. Example here..

XFX Radeon 5870 - £250 (remember these are just examples and not real prices).

XFX Radeon 5870 Black edition (with small overclock) - £300

XFX Radeon 5870 XXX edition (with larger overclock) - £350.

Now wouldn't it be simple to buy a vanilla 5870 and go off and find the bios file for a XXX edition and simply flash it to your el cheapo 5870 saving yourself £100.

And that's why they do it Joans. All of the cards are obviously the exact same as it's ATI in my example who made them but XFX then create a bios (using something like Nibitor (Nvidia bios editor) and then flash them to certain speeds and add a sticker onto the shell of the card before selling them at various prices.

It's the same thing with the Zotac Geforce GTX 470 Amp ! edition. All it is is a factory GTX 470 with a Zalman VF3000 cooler on. You can buy a cheap 470 and add the cooler for about £70 less. But obviously you can't flash on the bios from the Amp ! edition. Not that it's a problem, you can simply load the Amp ! edition's bios into Nibitor, jot down all the settings, load your card's bios in, edit it using all the settings from the Amp ! and then save it out and flash it over

It's not another bios though, it's the bios XFX themselves pointed me to download after I gave them the serial number of my card.
Basically, they brought out a GeForce card that wasn't compatible with future nVidia drivers without a bios update, and then they couldn't even get their own ID numbers correct in the bios.
Bear in mind that this is a pretty old card, and most of the discussion I could find about this is around 2 years old, and they still haven't corrected the file on their website.

Anyway, instead of a black screen, I know have a high-res version of Windows 7 trying to complete its installation.

Nice !

Yeah XFX haven't made any Nvidia cards since around December 09 when they fell out with Nvidia.

Like BFG (now out of business) and a couple of other retailers they were fucked because not only did Nvidia take forever to get out the 4xx cards but also stopped producing (and thus, supplying) the older cards. Meaning their retailers (BFG for example) did not have the product to provide replacements.

BFG were an Nvidia only supplier, meaning that for around 6 months they had nothing to sell or make profit from and it proved too much

XFX on the other hand were smarter and started selling lots of ATI products. Which pissed Nvidia off and XFX told them to fuck themselves.

Wasn't a bad move really, I mean they're still around

Is there a reason for me to upgrade to Windows 7 when my current XP install is nice and stable and does what I want just fine?

How much ram do you have?

Only if you want it to look really pretty or were thinking about going SSD.

What no brokey no fixey.

4GB. The most important part of my PC is the sound. I manage just fine as I am for that so don't see a reason to upgrade.

Xp is perfectly happy with 4 GB ram, only real reason I can see for you to upgrade to windows 7 over XP is that it's pretty and the file search has been vastly improved but I don't really think that alone is worth the hastle or money - you would probably have to back everything up and do a clean install + new drivers + anti-virus and so on.

edit: I've always kept my laptops as xp rather than bother upgrading them

I'm a huge fan of Windows 7, but I always say "if it aint broke, don't fix it"

I think it's a great improvement over xp, but you won't miss it if you never had it in the first place.

also. Windows 7 has convinced me I don't need a Mac anymore, but if things are fine with yourself there on Windows XP, I wouldn't go upgrading.

Assuming you only want to use 3GB of it, of course, because it can't count high enough to address the last gig (ish).

I don't even think XP could use a full 3gb from memory (well, not the X86 one). I think it was more like 2.5gb.

XP just looks so dated, Win 7 is fresher & starts up faster

Of the three of us in the IT department, I'm the only one who has stuck with XP. I doubt Windows 7 is going to make my job any easier so I don't see the benefit in upgrading just yet

I have 2 machines at work Win7 & XP. The win7 machine is my main PC & runs all my network admin tools & applications. The xp machine runs case management system.

Also my Win7 PC is a beast Corei7 with 8gb ram Win xp is C2D with 2gb ram

That'll be your graphics cards. Any 32 bit windows can access four Gb, but has to include your video RAM in that address space.

I rebooting my Windows 7 PC for the first time since the 28th December, because I've just installed VMWare.
It's still running just fine. I am quite impressed.

Mine's been rock solid too. But then I've never really had the problems that you are apparently supposed to with Windows. I must just be brilliant.