Overall, I think it performs a bit better than Vista, notably in terms of startup performance. Hard disk activity also settles down quickly.

I don't like some of the UI changes they've made, particularly with the views in Control Panel (lots of whitespace, and no view that is like 'list view', as well as single-click control panel icons despite everything else being double-click... WTF). The taskbar is counter-intuitive on default settings, can't be customised to a classic bar (neither can the start menu be set to classic). It is more helpful once you switch off window grouping, because until you do, you'll wonder where a window has gone until you notice a small growth on the side of its parent window - like say a mail composition window in your e-mail software.

3D performance is a midgen better than Vista was on my machine, but still noticeably worse than Win2k/XP.

IMO it's a lot more like what Vista should have performed like on release day.

I'm now running WinXP + Ubuntu, and am working on making Ubuntu my primary OS.

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My PC spec

Being the sick puppy that I am, I will jump in Win7 the day its released.

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"All civilizations become either spacefaring or extinct." -- Carl Sagan

I would understand that if you're having a really sucky time with Vista, or you find that performance is that much better with Win7, but what about the possibility that you make trade-offs in the upgrade that you wouldn't have wanted to make?

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My PC spec

I dealt with it when I jumped on Vista the first day it was out, but that was mostly poor driver support more than it was Vista.

I think poor 3rd party drivers gave Vista a bad name, once all these hardware manufactures got thier $%^& together Vista was pretty good.

As for Win7, I am hard pressed to find much negative about it so far and I like trying new things. I think WIn7 is gonna be great.

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"All civilizations become either spacefaring or extinct." -- Carl Sagan

I just cant swallow the prices of these things.

Im still on XP and the cheapest I can find Vista Home Premium is £62.22 which I suppose isnt that bad but with W7 just about to come out Im a bit confused as to what to do?? This is also the upgrade version which probably wont work for me as my current XP isnt genuine anyway.

I could try the RC W7 for a while I suppose but with my new PC parts coming this saturday I dont want to find that I cant play all my games in W7 RC and have to buy Vista just for a few months.

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OK looks like I am looking at about £180 for Vista home premium full edition which is just ridiculous. After the £550 out on the hardware theres no way Im paying that for an OS that about to be changed to W7 anyway.

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Im wondering about current support. If Im gonna try W7 I want everything to work properly because I want to avoid buying Vista if this is due out soon anyway. It would be nice to sit with the RC until release if possible.

Should be roughly:

Gigabyte EX58-UD5 Intel X58 MB
i7 Quad core 4ghz
6gig PC3 1600mHz DDR3
X-Fi Platinum
ATI 4870 512mb DDR5

Other things worth a mention:

G15 Keyboard
G9 Mouse

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Very close to my system. You shouldn't have any worries. The only thing I've had issues with on drivers is my Auzentech.... got to say, not been impressed with them. My first card died in a couple of days, and the replacement works, but not worth the premium I paid for it over a Creative. IMHO.... YMMV.

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Sweet! Well Ive just bought a new 500gb HD to go with the new rig so I dont have to wipe out my old drive. I'll put a fresh version of W7 RC on it and see how it all goes.

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Well I've spent most of today building my new rig. It didnt go smoothly at all as my case makes things a bit difficult to access and I discovered right at the end that I only had a 4 pin 12v cable and the new mobo requires an 8 pin. I couldnt for the life of me work out what was wrong when the damn thing just wouldnt start. I had all fans firing up and HDDs spinning but no post. Luckily I turned to the page of the manual that had a line reading 'Your PC will not startup without the 12v cable attached'
I had to nip back to my mum's place and check in the old spare room and as luck would have it there was the cable right in the top of the first box I looked in! I didnt want to try using the 4 pin just in case I ruined something.
I think I got everything right but I've now discovered that my rear case fan is sucking air right in next to where my CPU is blowing air out. One of them has to change at some point but it looks hella awkward. Anyway CPU temps look stable at the mo so I'll change that another time.

So, onto Windows 7 64bit RC. Installed quickly, updated quickly and so far has been running well. It picked up a few of my devices but the majority I had to install seperately experimenting with various different driver versions. Some have worked with XP drivers and others on Vista but I've been lucky with a few Windows 7 driver sets too that seem to work well such as the Catalyst and surprisingly enough the X-Fi Plat drivers.

My G15 Keyboard and G9 Mouse worked with Vista 64bit drivers and XP 64bit respectively as they wouldnt install under any other compatibility but they seem to be working fine.

Steam has been downloading my games again and they run just fine. Im getting notable speed improvements in loading games like CoD5 which used to still be half way through loading a level while the cut scene had finished playing. Now the cut scenes barely get a quarter through before its asking me to click to continue. Dawn of War 2 loads in about 20 seconds.

Only problem I have had so far was a BSOD after quitting a game of Track Mania Nations but that hasnt happened again since.

So far Im quite impressed! Its slick, runs well and gave my PC a good grade only let down by my data transfer rate which I expected.

Processor Intel(R) Core(TM) i7 CPU 920 @ 2.67GHz 7.7
Memory (RAM) 6.00 GB 7.9
Graphics ATI Radeon HD 4800 Series 6.8
Gaming graphics 3326 MB Total available graphics memory 6.8
Primary hard disk 403GB Free (466GB Total) 5.9

Shame Windows 7 still only reads the name of the processor and doesnt show overclocked speeds.

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My old setup didn't like standby/hibernation with Win7 RC1 32-bit, it might be worth testing that carefully (rather than leaving something open that you really didn't want to lose).

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My PC spec

I'm back to Vista for the moment. My Forte' (which is now for sale on eBay if anyone is interested) was causing major problems. I pulled it out, running on mobo sound at the moment. Auzentech drivers are pitiful and slower than molasses at getting them out and updated.

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Ahh hibernation was one of the things I turned off before anything else lol Just a habit I picked up from work.

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Windows 7 is not looking good for gaming. I read a test about Vista versus 7 in gaming. The performance was almost exactly the same. And since my experience with Vista was a nightmare, I am going to wait to see how people experience 7 gaming.
I had Vista refusing to run in OpenGL. I had to go back to XP.
I will wait and see first before jumping on the 7 bandwagon.

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What if your blessings come through raindrops
What if your healing comes through tears...

Because of Vista, or...?

Otherwise, odd, because in my experience hibernation tends to work more often than standby mode does, as essentially it is just loading an image of memory contents to disk then switching off, then on resume just reload the image.

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My PC spec