Windows 7

[Ziggy]

I wish I had a student email, I would love to get a discount 7. The irony of it is that I'm actually going to school for computers, just don't get an email.

[lordofduct]

I wish I had a student email, I would love to get a discount 7. The irony of it is that I'm actually going to school for computers, just don't get an email.

On the website there is a faq about if your school doesn't give out emails. And you can get your school added to the list. MS basically wants to give it to any students, but they need to have some model set up to prove you're a student.

What capture cards do you have Duct? I need to get a new one since the new nvidia drivers dropped support of my fx5700's tuner. Well that and Id rather turn that pc into a jukebox.

I have the Hauppauge PVR-500 MCE (it's got two onboard encoders, Windows see's it as two separate devices despite being on one card). As well as the ATI Theatre 5500Pro PCI-e version... which has horrible support on Linux, but can be hacked to work.

Downside to either of these choices though (as I bought them a long while ago) is that with everything going digital, they'll essentially go crap on me. They will support inputting an s-vid signal from a cable box or something... but dual channel recording and the sort will be shot.

They now have digital and angalogue combination cards. I'd go for one of those, but I'm not converting until I need to. It's not high priority at the moment.

Well, one of the main things I have to use WinXP for is my printer/scanner. It's made by Kodak, and they just flat-out don't support Linux, regardless of how many people beg for it.

I guess I'll have to try Virtual Box out and see if it can solve this problem...

Which model Kodak printer and scanner? There may be a generic driver out there. Both my printer and scanner don't have specific drivers for it and I run them on generic drivers (they aren't kodak though...).

Oh and yeah, as some one said, if you want quality USB forwarding to virtualbox you need to have the closed source version of Virtual Box, NOT the one in the Ubuntu repos. You can get it from their site.

http://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads

That or VMware, which has better USB support then Virtual Box. I used to use VMware, but it lacked some features I wanted more which VirtualBox had... that and the GUI for VMware sucks, it uses a browser based tool that crashes a lot, and every time the kernel updates you have to recompile VMware server. Not a huge deal, but it means like every 2 months (if you have auto-updates in Ubuntu) you're recompiling the damn thing... which just got damn boring to me.

[darthmunky]

will it be faster? Less spam/virus/adware? better compatibility?

Yes, that and more. It's supposedly the best OS since Windows 95.

[racketboy]

Wow -- the release date snuck up on me
I have one pre-order from Amazon.
I'll probably buy another family pack assuming all goes well.

Been running on XP on most stuff. Didn't mind Vista too much, but I think 7 should be just right

[racketboy]

will it be faster? Less spam/virus/adware? better compatibility?

Yes, that and more. It's supposedly the best OS since Windows 95.

I'm assuming when people say that, they mean the biggest improvement?

The only Windows I didn't like at the time was ME.
98 was pretty solid -- I used it well into this decade for lower-end machines.
Windows 2000 was killer assuming you didn't need a lot of modern features like good wifi support.
And XP is rock solid -- just doesn't have all the polish that 7 (and Vista to some extent) has.

[executioner]

You can get pro for $30 through student deal.

http://www.ocforums.com/showthread.php?t=618740
see from post 13 and down.

also, http://www.ocforums.com/showthread.php?t=622265

Yeah, I ordered my copy of Windows 7 Professional 64-bit last month for that price.

I would install it in the new pc I'm building if I could buy it for $30. What a sweet deal.

[Mod_Man_Extreme]

You can get pro for $30 through student deal.

http://www.ocforums.com/showthread.php?t=618740
see from post 13 and down.

also, http://www.ocforums.com/showthread.php?t=622265

Yeah, I ordered my copy of Windows 7 Professional 64-bit last month for that price.

I would install it in the new pc I'm building if I could buy it for $30. What a sweet deal.

If you work at a store that sells Microsoft products GS/Best Buy/Fry's etc.... you can actually take a look at Microsoft's RLS (Retail Loyalty Site, WITH A PROPER PAY STUB AND PROOF OF CURRENT EMPLOYMENT ONLY) site and get 7 Ultimate for only $10.

[Hobie-wan]

Well that was an exercise in futility for me. I lasted about an hour in W7 and only installed Firefox. Couldn't even really get past trying to set it up where I would be able to use it efficiently without a ton of wasted space, much less actually installing things I use regarly to see if they 'll work. Nuking it and putting XP Pro back on the laptop. UAC was less annoying, but everything else is still really damn annoying to me. So much wasted space with useless crap for a power user. I suppose W7 home might be missing options to turn off some of the helper crap versus Pro, but somehow I doubt it.

Installer lacked back buttons, if you want to change your mind or look what the other install options were you had to exit out and start over. The control panel items are spread across a million pages instead of being tight and compact like older versions. Some control panel pages have a link in the top left to go back to the list, some don't. I know you can use the breadcrumb stuff at the top, but hooray for inconsistency.

Wow, just wow. What a flaming POS.

</rant>

[RCBH928]

I just want to know what makes people want to switch to Win7.
As far as I know XP is damn stable and everything works on it, why go through the trouble of upgrading?

Basically the question is: Win7 > XP?

other than GUI and your bells and whistles , what else?

[fastbilly1]

Kingmohd,
The way I see it is this. If you want a Windows OS you have two options:
32bit/lower speced computers - XP
64bit/higher speced computers - 7

Now there are thousands of OS options out there, but if you have to have Windows I have come to adopt that point of view.

Duct,
I only want one so I can record game footage for the site. The actual tv interface is less of an issue for me since most of the shows I want to watch popup on hulu anyway.