The Windows 7 Experience... How do beta testers feel about the new M OS?

[brandonjbegle 0]

Can anyone please tell me why my computer says something to the effect of "cannot find install.wim" when i try to install Windows 7? I had no trouble with any other os i installed from dvd.

[rayzoredge 2]

Can anyone please tell me why my computer says something to the effect of "cannot find install.wim" when i try to install Windows 7? I had no trouble with any other os i installed from dvd.

From what I can tell with some quick Google-fu, you might have a bad download or a bad burn.

I have the Windows 7 Beta Build 7000 download, and the ISO file is 3.15GB (3,387,011,072 bytes on disk). If you have any other builds, I can't help you too much on that... but if you have the same build as I do, check the file size. If it doesn't match, I would suggest you download it again. (You can probably check hashes - MD5 - to make sure you have the right download, but I am not very knowledgeable on that topic.) Some people found out that their downloads were corrupted or actually incomplete when downloading with Internet Explorer (go figure ), so if that's the case, you're going to have to suck it up and try it again with Firefox or Opera. Since the official download site is now unavailable, you're stuck with either finding a physical working copy from a friend or looking to torrents... which can be a scary ordeal all in itself if that concept is foreign to you.

[rayzoredge 2]

I just recently "acquired" a later copy of Windows 7 and burned it to DVD, thinking that my previous copy of Windows 7 downloaded from Microsoft back in the day would not update me to build 7057 (or whichever it was... I can't remember). (The fact that the expiration was extended to March 2010 was more incentive for me to install the later version of Windows 7, not to mention that it's the supposed release candidate. ) However, I hit a snag trying to install it this time around.On inserting and booting from the CD, I went through the prompts, but then I bumped into a problem that apparently plagues Vista users too: no device drivers were found for the hardware that I had. Basically, I could boot from the DVD, but then after getting into the installation program, it didn't recognize my optical drive anymore (it seemed). Retarded, but I supposed that there was a workaround...... and there is, but unfortunately, the solution was to modify BIOS settings that I had no access to because I have a Dell (with their infamous locked BIOS). The solution involved changing the behavior of recognizing SATA devices... and I couldn't do anything about it because Dell makes this impossible. Anyone find a workaround to this?

[rayzoredge 2]

Couldn't find Tramposch's benchmark thread in an efficient manner, so I'm going to selfishly and shamelessly post in my own thread here.

Windows 7 Benchmarks against Windows XP SP3 and Vista RTM and SP1
Quick and dirty comparison between XP, Vista, and 7

I can't believe it took this long for me to accidentally stumble upon benchmarks to see how Windows 7 rates. Oh well.

Edit: Here's a more recent benchmark comparison (in the quick-and-dirty fashion).

Edited April 13, 2009 by rayzoredge (see edit history)

[rpgsearcherz 5]

Is Windows 7 faster or slower at transferring files than Vista? My biggest complaint between going from XP to Vista is my file transfers are much, much slower. Even with UAC off it takes 3-4x as long to transfer a large file. Was this cleared up in Windows 7 or is it still prevalent?

[Tramposch 1]

Well usually the operating system shouldn't slow down transfer speeds.Is it possible that your windows vista machine has a slower hard drive? If you installed vista on your laptop, laptops typically have 5400RPM hard drives, while desktops typically have 7200RPM, so it could be hard drive speed, not the OS. You should look into that.

[rpgsearcherz 5]

Well usually the operating system shouldn't slow down transfer speeds.
Is it possible that your windows vista machine has a slower hard drive? If you installed vista on your laptop, laptops typically have 5400RPM hard drives, while desktops typically have 7200RPM, so it could be hard drive speed, not the OS.

You should look into that.

As weird as it is, it's the same on all 3 PC's I installed Vista on...Two came with it originally...The other I put on myself.

As for the difference, I've had them all on XP before(Since Vista sucked in the beginning) and now 2 have Vista again...After re-downgrading one of them it sped up again(with XP).

Could it have to do with CPU/RAM then? Maybe Vista is just jacking it all for the OS itself....

The stats of the 3 PC's are:

2 of them are the same, 1 GB ram, 1.8 GHZ dual core, onboard video
The other is : 2 GB ram, 3. 0 GHZ dual core, 8800GT

Even on the faster one the transfers are pretty slow...But that could be due to low ram?

[rayzoredge 2]

@rpgsearcherz: It would have to be due to low RAM because I read that the way Vista works (and one of the reasons why it seems to be so much of a resource hog) is because a set amount of RAM is allocated to EACH open window in Explorer for one reason or another, whether it's minimized or not. (Windows 7 addresses this issue by only allocating memory for open, visible Explorer windows. I don't know what XP does.) Also, Vista seems to always be doing something with your RAM, so what it thinks is idle will be used by background tasks such as indexing. Checking your RAM (and CPU) usage using a widget is pretty ineffective because the widget itself takes up quite an amount just by doing what it does. Also, if you wanted to take the words of the tester who benchmarked all three operating systems, to include Vista SP1 and Vista RTM, the results would indicate that Windows 7 trumps just about every measure for transferring files, to exclude moving 100MB of data (which XP is apparently faster in doing) and moving 2.5GB of data under load (which Vista was better at). (Those results were on a Pentium dual core system; the AMD system still had Windows 7 shining on top of the others with those same tasks... so those results may be hardware-determined.)

 

Keep in mind that Vista is supposed to be slow within initial usage, but as time goes on and as programs are Super-Prefetched, items are indexed, and the OS "learns" what you do and how frequently you do it, Vista shoudl gradually become viable. Also, just to note: SP2 is due out this month, and although it doesn't give us anything earth-shattering (or at least to the average consumer, since SP2 offers native Blu-Ray support and other things), it does contain some bug fixes that should finally bring Vista to be a decent operating system.

[mircealuncan 0]

I have been using 7 for a couple of months, and I have to say that I am completely satisfied so far. Despite the fact that it is a Beta version I hadn't have any problems so far. I am using it on a SiemensFujitsu Notebook with only a 1Gb of RAM and I can use any visual enhacements or effects without any problems. There are no drivers for 7 yet, but the Vista drivers work fine.

[rpgsearcherz 5]

@rpgsearcherz: It would have to be due to low RAM because I read that the way Vista works (and one of the reasons why it seems to be so much of a resource hog) is because a set amount of RAM is allocated to EACH open window in Explorer for one reason or another, whether it's minimized or not. (Windows 7 addresses this issue by only allocating memory for open, visible Explorer windows. I don't know what XP does.) Also, Vista seems to always be doing something with your RAM, so what it thinks is idle will be used by background tasks such as indexing. Checking your RAM (and CPU) usage using a widget is pretty ineffective because the widget itself takes up quite an amount just by doing what it does. Also, if you wanted to take the words of the tester who benchmarked all three operating systems, to include Vista SP1 and Vista RTM, the results would indicate that Windows 7 trumps just about every measure for transferring files, to exclude moving 100MB of data (which XP is apparently faster in doing) and moving 2.5GB of data under load (which Vista was better at). (Those results were on a Pentium dual core system; the AMD system still had Windows 7 shining on top of the others with those same tasks... so those results may be hardware-determined.)

 

Keep in mind that Vista is supposed to be slow within initial usage, but as time goes on and as programs are Super-Prefetched, items are indexed, and the OS "learns" what you do and how frequently you do it, Vista shoudl gradually become viable. Also, just to note: SP2 is due out this month, and although it doesn't give us anything earth-shattering (or at least to the average consumer, since SP2 offers native Blu-Ray support and other things), it does contain some bug fixes that should finally bring Vista to be a decent operating system.

Ah, that makes a lot of sense. I plan to get a ram upgrade in the future(when it's really needed) and I'll see how much of a difference it makes.

 

I'll be reverting back to XP soon just because....

 

As for how ram is used, I had no idea...I'm pretty sure on XP it's based on what a program needs. So let's say you have a game open and it takes up 800 MB's of ram, and then you minimize it, the amount of ram taken drops (which is why when you make it full screen again it takes a while for it to recalibrate). I could be wrong on that though.

[tinoymalayil 0]

Windows 7 is quite awesome.But having problems.i.e I am unable to access the content in the temporary internet files.and also unable to play some media format(i.e I already added some codecs.But not possible to run the media belongs to that codecs)