# Windows 7: A New Hope



## Lenny (Mar 12, 2009)

_^ A screenshot of my desktop so you can compare some things about the UI to a picture. Note that the black enclosures around my icons are from a third-party program (Stardock Fences), rather than a built-in Windows 7 feature._

The beta has been out for, what, a month now? The pre-RC build has been leaked, and the RC itself should be released within a few weeks, yet we have no threads about W7! I know I'm not the only user (I think), so I'll get the ball rolling.

First of all, I want to say: *Windows 7 is what Vista should have been*. Don't get me wrong, I quite like Vista (the sidebar was a fantastic addition, and the user interface made me happy inside), but there are a few problems. I won't delve into them here, though I will say that in some tasks it's slow (such as startup and shutdown), and in others it just fails.

Now, Windows 7. The installation is a rip-off of Vista's, just with more blue, and fewer screens, oh, and it's a wee bit faster. Startup is ever so slightly different, with a new Windows logo screen, but login is the same (again, more blue). What has been improved with startup is the speed. It was fast when it was newly installed, but I put that down to it being a clean installation. Now, however, with nearly 50gb of programs installed, and having not defragged it or cleaned anything up in any way, I can safely say that startup is blisteringly quick. It's not quite the 15 seconds that Microsoft were promising (though they may still crack that in the RC, or with the final release), but it's getting there. With Vista I could end up waiting three minutes for everything to stop blinking at me, whilst in Windows 7 it's more like 45 seconds to a minute, and that's with a number of things on startup, such as Stardock Fences and MaxTo, that aren't exactly nippy when loading. Shutdown is a dream - ten, maybe twenty seconds at most, compared to the two or three minutes it takes [a heavily used] Vista.

I'll say now that Windows 7 is currently my default OS, with XP, Vista and Fedora 10 rarely seeing the light of day.

It's all very well if the OS starts up and shuts down quickly, but it's quickly negated if it just means you can quickly load Bug Central, capital city of Naffsville (sorry, it's quarter past eleven, I've had a long day, and I've still got quite a bit of work ahead of me!). Surprisingly, you come off the superfast motorway at Speedy Junction and enter a beautiful new world that works. It's like normal life, but prettier and without the gas bills (I've got seven straight hours tomorrow, too - it's like a full time job! Though office workers don't have to sit for two hours programming complex algorithms, or trying to untangle a mess of classical logic).

Someone in another thread asked me if W7 tends towards Vista in the way that things are organised, or XP. The answer is Vista, but done properly.

Your user folder sort of makes a return as libraries: a collection of folders can be grouped together to form a library. So rather than having a single folder for My Documents, or My Pictures, you can group all the folders you have of holiday snaps together into the My Pictures library, regardless of where they are on your myriad hard drives. As far as I can tell, a library has no limits on the number of folders you can add. You can also create your own libraries to go with the four default ones (Documents, Pictures, Music and Videos).

A small aside - when you right-click a desktop item, you get the standard right-click menu. If you Shift + Right-click, then a nifty extended menu pops up which includes, among other things, the ability to send to any of the folders in your user folder (the standard menu just lets you choose drives).

I suppose I ought to next talk about the interface. Before I do, though, another little aside - I DID NOT NEED TO INSTALL MY GRAPHICS CARD, shock-horror, eek, heart-attack, drop. It seems that the good old days of an 800x600 resolution on a new install are gone. Dead and buried. It has to be the single most impressive thing that struck me when I first installed W7 - for a modern Windows operating system to not only recognise your graphics card, but install generic drivers for it that actually _work _is, well, obscene! And an aside within the aside, nVidia have released graphics drivers purely for W7 Beta. It gave me a warm, fuzzy feeling inside. 

Right, interface. "Pretty Vista", is what I'll describe it is. It's pretty much Vista, but it's a pretty Vista. Remember that I mentioned earlier how I like the Vista interface? Well now I don't. I find it blocky, and drab, and oh so terrible (almost as bad as the XP interface!!). The interface in W7 is that bit more refined and polished. Yes, the main features seems to be more square, but they're nicer for it. My absolute single most favourite thing about the interface is the startbar, and what can be done with it:

* BIG mode - the taskbar, in big mode, is 40 pixels high (a whole ten pixels more than in Vista, XP, ME, 98, ...). As a result, the Windows circle fits perfectly. Gone is the two-tone effect with a little line down the middle, instead the startbar is a single coloured, semi-transparent bar (which, as usual, is customisable).

* Nifty taskbar - each icon, when you hover over it, is given separators on either side, and a nice little light below it. The icons themselves are smaller. I particularly like the new icon for networks.

* Show desktop button - click it and it'll take you the desktop. Click it a second time and it will open all your windows back up. Simply hover over it and it will make every window transparent (well, see-through glassy), with a black border, showing the desktop and the position of your windows.

And perhaps my favourite part of the startbar:

* New ways to show your icons - three options: Always combined, combined when full, never combined. Never combined is your standard pre-W7 startbar, with a small difference in that windows from the same process are one long bar with separators (obviously you can click one and not have the others open, too). Combined when full makes some bars show just the icon, whilst others show icon and text label... if the startbar is full, otherwise it's as standard. Always combined shows only the icon. If there are more than one windows in that group open, then it shows a layer behind it for every other window. Usually I'd stay away from things like that, simply because I despise how Windows groups icons, but in W7 it's different. Hovering over any open program pops up a preview for each icon in the group. Hovering over that turns every other window glassy, showing only that one properly, and clicking it opens it.

I think I ought to mention that the startbar can be used as a dock of sorts, but I feel it is more effective than the certain Mac feature it obviously drew inspiration from - open programs have squares around them, with layers for multiple windows (as far as experience goes, multiple windows/instances on the Mac means more icons on the dock? Someone correct me if I'm wrong. I wouldn't mind a screenshot too, if I may) and the hover function really helps to see what there is.

There are other little things on the startbar which don't really need a full description, like a progress bar on the startbar for those that have them in the window, and the ability to drag and drop the icons (and those in the taskbar) to change their order.

Oh, the right click menu of icons on the startbar has changed, but a Shift + Right-click brings up the old menu.

I haven't played around with the Start menu much, but it looks the same as Vista, with a few visual changes.

I'm getting tired, so I'll list a few things I'll touch on in later posts if people are interested:

- Adding new Devices is a dream
- More calculator modes: 64-bit binary, baybey!!
- Superior Network Connections and identifying connections to Vista's
- Desktop Gadgets (something I forgot to mention - no sidebar)
- Fantastic stability and performance

A few things to read, if you're so inclined:

A sneak peek at the Windows 7 Release Candidate | Ed Bott’s Microsoft Report | ZDNet.com
Details a lot of UI tweaks much more elegantly than my tired ramblings

Windows 7 build 7048 vs. Windows 7 beta 1 vs. Vista vs. XP performance shootout - which is best? | Hardware 2.0 | ZDNet.com
Vista? XP? Windows 7 walks over them! They might as well be the pavement below it's mighty feet!!

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I'll draw this to an end, because I'm off to bed (I'll wake up early and do some work).

Put simply, Windows 7 has impressed me so much that I'm seriously considering purchasing it on launch. That's what student loans are for, right?

I'm going to be really sad when the end of August rolls around and the beta period runs out.


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## TheEndIsNigh (Mar 13, 2009)

Ah but Lenny are we (meaning you) not the owner of the world's most powerful dream machine. A thing of fantasy sucking in 20000 cubic feet of cooling air every ms and thrusting a super heated jet stream that registers on most weather satellites.

What of us poor sad bas*ards that only have a 80386 and are still saving for their 80387 chip in the hope they can preform those tricky multiplication calculations on lotus 123 MK2


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## Saeltari (Mar 13, 2009)

Lenny, August? Have you thought of a Technet Plus subscription?


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## Lenny (Mar 13, 2009)

Saeltari said:


> Lenny, August? Have you thought of a Technet Plus subscription?



It would be nice, but money's against me (well, the odd product which I might use for a few years can be justified, but maybe not a couple-of-hundred-pounds-a-year subscription that I may not take advantage of).

It's only a few months to wait for release, and who knows, MS have a habit of extending things.

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TheEndIsNigh said:


> Ah but Lenny are we (meaning you) not the owner of the world's most powerful dream machine.
> 
> What of us poor sad bas*ards that only have a 80386 and are still saving for their 80387 chip in the hope they can preform those tricky multiplication calculations on lotus 123 MK2



True enough.

I think it's the second link which might answer your question - the team at ZDNet compared XP SP3 (32-bit), Vista SP1 (32-bit) and Windows 7 builds 7000 (32-bit and 64-bit - 7000 is the original beta) and 7048 (64-bit - it's the latest leaked build) on two machines - a high spec AMD platform, and a low spec Intel platform (Intel 2.2ghz dual core, nVidia 8400 GS, 1gb RAM), and the 32-bit version of Windows 7 wiped the floor with all the others.

I imagine that as long as your specs meet the minimum requirements, and you get a version of Windows 7 that suits your computer (say Basic over Ultimate), then I don't see why you wouldn't see the same performance.

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Talking about performance, I timed a shutdown last night - 11 seconds!


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## Lenny (Mar 17, 2009)

Build 7057 (with a build stamp 090305-2000 -- 5th March 2009, 8pm) was leaked a week or so ago, and there are precious little new features (other than some wallpapers and a few performance tweaks), which implies that Microsoft are very nearly at the RC stage (if anyone is interested, the Release Candidate is expected to be available for download sometime in April/May). It's the first 32-bit version of the OS to be available since the original 7000 build (the one that Microsoft had on their site), and, in an incredibly heartening way, shows a performance increase over 7048, which itself was better than build 7000, which was better than Vista and XP. Is anyone excited yet?

Windows 7 build 7057 - Performance that blasts past XP, Vista and previous builds | Hardware 2.0 | ZDNet.com

^ is another performance comparison (notice how it performs incredibly well on both the high-spec machine and the low-spec-machine). Obviously the numbers can't be taken to mean that, say Build 7057 is three times better than XP, simply because they're just values, not measurements.

Still, it's looking impressive (look at the number of 1s and 2s it scores, indicating that it is the fastest of the bunch for those tests).

Can't wait for the RC!

Oh, don't think I've posted this link - it's a blog post asking if W7 could be released as it is now: Is Windows 7 reliable enough to release now? | Ed Bott’s Microsoft Report | ZDNet.com.


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## Cayal (Mar 18, 2009)

Microsoft and hope should never be used in the same sentence unless it surrounds the word 'crush'.


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## Lenny (Mar 28, 2009)

There's a special circle of hell for Microsoft haters. 

And for Microsoft lovers, come to that...

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Anywho, some fool at MS uploaded the RC page a day or two ago, and whipped it off when they realised their mistake, but not before someone got a screenshot and posted it all over the internet. The page had a date of May, and the download link is set to expire in June. There was some other info on it, so I'll quickly summarise everything:

- Windows 7 Beta (Build 7000) runs out in August
- Windows 7 Release Candidate will be available for download in May
- The RC download will expire at the end of June
- The RC itself will no longer function after June 2010

Now that's one hell of a life cycle for a RC! Windows 7 is expected to go to manufacturers in the last quarter of this year, and machines with Windows 7 pre-installed should be in shops before Christmas. I imagine it'll be available to us lowly peons in the first couple of months of 2010.

Oh, and I've come across a couple of other nifty features. 

I'm going to be making a blog post on Commonmind's *TheGUE *in the next couple of days about the Windows 7 interface and its features, and when I do I'll post bits of it here, too.


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## Lenny (Apr 1, 2009)

Build 7068 was leaked a couple of days ago (it has a build date of March 21st) - once again, nothing new except for a few wallpapers.

http://blogs.zdnet.com/hardware/?p=4062&tag=nl.e589
http://content.zdnet.com/2346-12554_22-283286.html?tag=nl.e589
http://blogs.zdnet.com/hardware/?p=4074&tag=nl.e589
http://blogs.zdnet.com/hardware/?p=4076&tag=nl.e589
You might have guessed by now that I'm rather fond of ZDNet. 

Can you feel the anticipation? I can! I can't wait for the RC to become available.

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I'm pencilling a new TheGUE post in for Saturday, if anyone happens to be waiting for it. Gives me a few days to get some screenshots together, and maybe find some more gems lurking about. Hey, I may even do a few screen recordings.


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## Lenny (Apr 20, 2009)

I never did get round to my User Interface and Features post... ah well - maybe after my exams.

Anyway, an update for you all: MSDN and TechNet get Windows 7 RC? Public to wait till May 5 (Updated x2) - Ars Technica

The official release date for the Windows 7 RC (and Windows 7 Server RC, I think) is *May 5th*. Yay! That means I've got three weeks to play with it before my first exam! 

It is not only recommended by Microsoft, but commanded, that the RC is installed as a clean install - no upgrades. Whilst this is common sense for all operating systems, it's going to annoy people who have had the Beta installed since January and customised it to their liking. I'm not one of those - I love installing new operating systems! 

So there you go - May 5th. I believe that the reports of the RC expiring in June 2010 still stand.


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## AE35Unit (Apr 20, 2009)

Well I'd like to think it was better than Vista which is THE worst OS I have ever come across,but this being Microshaft I very much doubt it! Backwards compatible? Yea with Vista I bet.


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## Esioul (Apr 22, 2009)

Lenny said:


> Your user folder sort of makes a return as libraries: a collection of folders can be grouped together to form a library. So rather than having a single folder for My Documents, or My Pictures, you can group all the folders you have of holiday snaps together into the My Pictures library, regardless of where they are on your myriad hard drives. As far as I can tell, a library has no limits on the number of folders you can add. You can also create your own libraries to go with the four default ones (Documents, Pictures, Music and Videos).


 
That sounds pretty cool. I fidn naviagting multiple hard drives a bit annoying. However, I must say, the more I use Linux, the more I like it...


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## AE35Unit (Apr 22, 2009)

Lenny I just discovered where your desktop pic came from. My other half has rented a PS3 and today got Big Planet Little Planet to try. Its a sackboy!


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## Lenny (Apr 22, 2009)

*LittleBigPlanet *actually, but close enough.  And yes, it is a Sackboy. Fantastic little fellows, aren't they?


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## AE35Unit (Apr 22, 2009)

Lenny said:


> *LittleBigPlanet *actually, but close enough.  And yes, it is a Sackboy. Fantastic little fellows, aren't they?



Yea its pretty cool tech. Pity the game is pants!


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## Cayal (Apr 23, 2009)

The game is awesome.


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## Chirios (May 5, 2009)

apparently during testing some people found a massive hole in the security of the OS, made a virus and completely screwed up the entire thing.

Kinda sets back the whole: better security than vista idea :/


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## Lenny (May 5, 2009)

I'd heard about a bug in the boot (allowing you to override various parts of the boot sequence, and ultimately skip the security steps), but not within the OS - unless it's the boot bug you're talking about.

Not to defend Microsoft, but every program has bugs (even professionals spend months simply debugging), and a number of them won't be found within a controlled environment such as the development house. Hood knows that I've finished programs to a degree that completely satisfied me, only to have an end-user e-mail me a few days later with a bug that I never came across, simply because the testing processes cannot accurately mirror real life operation.

Now if you think of an operating system and how many bugs it will have (millions upon millions of lines of code!), it's an impressive feat to have operating systems that work most of the time. Indeed, in the months I've used it, I've found Windows 7 to be the most reliable OS I've used (the ones I've used properly are 95, 98, ME, XP, Vista and 7). The first thing I try to do with a new OS is blue screen it, simply so I can find the limit. I've yet to succeed in blue-screening Windows 7 (which is amazing when you think of it as being built upon Vista, and that Vista blue screened simply because you booted it up).

Before someone throws the Mac and Linux argument at me, stand back and think about market share. Microsoft have got themselves in a tight corner - their business practices have given them the majority of the market. Of course Windows is going to be the most targeted! There is, however, another market - Mac and Linux users who think, quite arrogantly, that because they're not using Windows they're safe. Did anyone hear about the quite extensive botnet made up exclusively of Mac machines? Just goes to show what happens when you live your life in conceit. Those Mac and Linux users who believe that simply by using those Operating Systems (which, in response to the original point, still have their failings - I've heard a lot of grips about the latest OS X and how Mac has sacrificed even more functionality for something that is supposed to look 'nice') they're safe. Don't get me wrong, though - there are some users with a level head who still have AV, AS and a firewall installed.

Anyway, I'm off to download the Windows 7 RC (out today! ).

I'll let you know how it all goes tomorrow.


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## Happy Joe (May 5, 2009)

Last I heard the boot exploit required machine access in person (no system/machine is secure if someone has personal access).

Enjoy!


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## Happy Joe (May 6, 2009)

I installed the RC yesterday, overall I like Win 7 (I really don't mind Vista, but prefer XP over Vista; Win 7 will probably be my preference after I achieve more familiarity).
It does need a lot of polishing to get rid of the little annoyances though.

It seems little different than Vista, although it is faster.
It did install much easier than Vista and more quickly than XP(if I could figure out where they moved different items to customize it).
It still has UAC; we will see if it gives as many problems as Vista.
It seems to be geared toward people who know little or nothing about computers and has a high level of moderately annoying redundancy, along with being overly complex. (I can do much of the maintenance/setup for new OS much quicker and easier with XP).
The RC (Win 7 Ultimate) includes Media Center with a few minor improvements.
This machine has about 3/4 gig of RAM and the recommendations form Microsoft are for 1 gig; so far no issues though...
I can't stand the gadgets and desktop toys; they are distracting and I erase/disable them.

Later today I'll give Crysis a go and see how the machine compares between XP Pro and W-7.

Enjoy!


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## Lenny (May 7, 2009)

I'll give my initial thoughts on the RC, and add a couple of things to Joe's post.

Definitely quicker than the Beta version - shutdown has decreased to nine seconds and various things within the OS are more responsive. Startup is still forty-five seconds to a minute.

I've disabled UAC. 

One of the interesting things about the leaked versions was how the instructions and labels in various folders became less and less technical, and more user friendly. I haven't gone searching for any yet, though.

I've turned Media Centre off, so I can't really comment on it. Once I've downloaded a couple of new browsers, I'm going to turn IE off, too.

Ditto - no issues at all. The only problem I've had with the computer since installing it is my heatsink vibrating, and that's because I took the entire tower to pieces and cleaned it yesterday. Still can't find the loose screw (got a bit of paper wedged between the wall of fans and the heatsink which seems to have stopped it for the time being).

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New section for Crysis.

Have you got a machine without a graphics card, out of interest? If you have, install Crysis on it and play it. I've heard from numerous sources that Windows 7 can play Crysis on low settings without a graphics card, but I've yet to try it.


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## Happy Joe (May 9, 2009)

I gave the Crysis demo a workout for a quick look see;
The only MB that I have with onboard graphics is (I think) in the media center and would be a bear to check out due to the closeness of the rather large screen.
This internet machine has a Nvidia 6800 GT vid card, (old Barton laptop processor running at 2.2ghz) and at least on the demo Win 7 was more compatible (low settings) than XP. Xp would occasionally freeze for a few seconds on quick mouse moves, Win 7 may slowdown but doesn't seem to freeze. Based on experiences with full blown crysis the ice level would be the toughest for hardware to resolve.

Right now IE 8 deserves to remain in beta I have had several issues browsing with IE 8; couldn't log on to several forums (Crons worked well); "could not connect" errors. After trying a log on with a blank long on and getting an error screen log on was possible from that point.

Win 7 does not want to work with Comodo firewall.
It does seem to work with Avast anti-virus.

Enjoy!


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## Lenny (May 9, 2009)

I've got Comodo installed and it seems to work properly - install it in compatibility mode (I think I went with Vista SP2).

Have you tried XP Mode, out of interest? I've found it works rather well. The Virtual Machine itself is pretty decent (the last one I tried was VMWare on the Windows 7 beta, and that blue screened whenever I coughed at it). It also amuses me to open up programs from the All Programs Menu and see them with the XP borders. 

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On the problems front, if I personalise my desktop in any way, then the saturation and contrast of everything gets whacked up by stupid levels. I don't know if this is a problem simply with Windows 7, or if it's because I've got Fences installed - when I had the wallpaper set to slideshow, then every time it changed the fences would disappear, and only re-appear if I clicked the desktop.


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## Saeltari (May 10, 2009)

Downloaded RC1 and will be installing it this week. Looking forward to seeing how it is as I am one of those who actually like Vista.

Your comments on Mac and Linux users is right on.  I have a friend who is big in pc security and one of his favorite things is to point out to the Macophiles all of the great exploits they have.


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## Happy Joe (May 10, 2009)

> I've got Comodo installed and it seems to work properly


 
I'll give it a try; I had thought that Comodo was listed as compatible (and did try XP sp3 compatibility), since this will only be about a one month trial I probably won't put a lot of time into it. 
(Summer hobbies are taking over; need to modify (eternal/continuing project) and prep the Jeep for camping/four wheeling season, also I moved a milling machine into the garage, last week, and need to set it up, run electric etc.).

If I get time I may haul this drive down to the dual processor machine in the lab (basement) and see if the install will run there (out of curiosity).

The biggest complaint I have with Vista is the PITA UAC (disabled on the media center machine).
Microsoft must be aware of the issues since the UAC in win 7 is much less of a pain, so far.

Enjoy!


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## Happy Joe (May 12, 2009)

The weather was kind of cold here yesterday, so I put in some more time with Win 7.

I got Comodo firewall and anti virus to install by saving the down load to disk then setting the compatibility to Vista in properties and running the setup as Administrator.

Nero 6 comes up with many warnings about non compatibility when install is attempted (possibly due to media center being my default player, but then again Nero 6 predates Vista by quite some time).  I may try Nero 8 when I get the chance.

Spybot definitely slows IE8 down, IE8 seems to have problems with the large restricted sites list.  (I'm not rabidly anti M$ but it looks to me like this may be intentional due to M$ use of similar "restricted sites list" techniques in their Safe Search/Surf or whatever the name is; or it just be simply another example of why IE8 is not ready for the real world).

After installing 2 gigs of pics, Comodo and some reader software along with Word 2000 (seems to work fine even as old as it is); the Crysis Demo no longer works acceptably (even with minimal background apps running).  Comodo has some parts that are difficult to temporarily disable/turn off without a reboot, no other obvious, additional, background apps were running.  This change in performance may be due to the "less than recommended amount of memory" in this machine.  In comparison with the same and more programs on the same machine XP pro and Home both ran the Crysis demo better.  I'll try to optimize this better later to find what works best/interferes least.

So far the biggest disappointment/most incompatible program has been Nero 6.

It looks like my purposeful evaluation of Win 7 on a substandard machine, with old apps, to test its limits and gain familiarity with its foibles and trouble shooting, is working... 

Enjoy!


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