Are Hardcore PC Gamers Using Windows 7 Over Vista?
- Thread starter John Funk
- Start date
I did a clean install of Windows 7 a few months ago. I got the Professional edition for £30 with my student email address, haven't had a single problem with it since I bought it. Loving it!
tyrannus007 said:
As long as you're sticking with the same CPU type (x32 or x64) the upgrade from Vista to Windows 7 should be nearly painless, and you won't lose a thing. The only problems you might run into are if you have some older, incompatible programs - that's pretty unlikely though.Danny Ocean said:
If you're upgrading from XP or to a 64-bit version from a 32-bit version you can't do an in-place upgrade, but you can do clean upgrade that will save your documents. You'll need to reinstall any programs though.
With Vista and Windows 7, the upgrades are nearly as good as a full format and install. The new install process is quite nice.
I've been quite happy with Vista, and it was definitely a nice upgrade from XP. But the benefits that Vista had weren't really there for gamers, and if that's what you mostly use your PC for XP was a better option. Vista is definitely a better OS for working though, and we all use our PCs for that here too.Trivun said:
Windows 7 is an improved, optimized version of Vista, which makes it a lot more compelling as an upgrade for gamers (and a no-brainer upgrade from Vista). We're also getting to the point where it's becoming important to be able to address more than 4gb of memory, and the x64 version is easily the best option for that.
I'm seeing a lot of mis-information so I thought I clear up some concerns. First of all, you don't have to worry about reinstalling everything unless you are still on XP or changing from a 32bit to 64bit. As long as you keep the same bits say Vista 64bit Home and upgrade to 7 64bit Ultimate you will be ok and have no problem keeping everything that is there.
In terms of stability it is as rock solid as XP and with some time and patches will be even more so. Games designed on XP run fine with no issues, however if you got games from 95/98 you are going to need to tinker to run them or just give up.
I've never had windows compatibility work on any version of windows, which I still think is just for display and does absolutely nothing just to piss you off.
If you want dx10 which will shortly become the standard from the dominant dx9 then you will come on over to the 7 family. If you are not one for graphics then there isn't a need for you to switch except for the fact that XP will no longer be supported and staying on that OS can be quite the security risk.
In terms of stability it is as rock solid as XP and with some time and patches will be even more so. Games designed on XP run fine with no issues, however if you got games from 95/98 you are going to need to tinker to run them or just give up.
I've never had windows compatibility work on any version of windows, which I still think is just for display and does absolutely nothing just to piss you off.
If you want dx10 which will shortly become the standard from the dominant dx9 then you will come on over to the 7 family. If you are not one for graphics then there isn't a need for you to switch except for the fact that XP will no longer be supported and staying on that OS can be quite the security risk.
I have been using XP since my first computer in 2005, then I switched to Vista in late 2008, used it for a month, got annoyed at how much it sucked, went back to XP and got W7 like a month after it came out and I am still using it now 
I've upgraded from XP 32 bit to Windows 7 64 bit, and I gotta say all your concerns have been met. The upgrade is far from just cosmetic, it is a very sleek and has a much more efficient UI with clutter going to a complete minimum and with the "Aero" features making orginization much easier and simpler, making things a lot quicker, but the best part about it is that it takes up just as much resources as XP - which is obviously dramatically less than vista. The compatibility mode is much better too and I can run older games like Neverwinter Nights and Total Annihilation.Icehearted said:
Win7 keeps everything good about XP, tweaks the vista UI, and gives DX10 and DX11 support. If you want to "boil it down" like that anyway.
See, the problem with Vista that most people don't realize is that Microsoft was too ambitious: for example, one of the huge changes they tried to make was to how the Operating System handled and interacted with drivers. Remember how you had to reboot your machine whenever you installed a driver on XP? Have you noticed that you [usually] don't have to do that on Vista/Win7?
It simply turned out to be a thornier problem than they originally thought.
Then you throw Windows Display Driver Model on top of that (which allowed a 3D desktop as well as supposedly improving graphics performance), and insert the fact that given the proprietary nature of the graphics card technology, nVidia, ATI, and others insisted on producing their own drivers, and you had a receipe for disasterous driver support.
Win7 is so much better because they didn't try to innovate, they focused on refining.
It simply turned out to be a thornier problem than they originally thought.
Then you throw Windows Display Driver Model on top of that (which allowed a 3D desktop as well as supposedly improving graphics performance), and insert the fact that given the proprietary nature of the graphics card technology, nVidia, ATI, and others insisted on producing their own drivers, and you had a receipe for disasterous driver support.
Win7 is so much better because they didn't try to innovate, they focused on refining.
After i installed Windows 7 i personally noticed an increase in performance. from framerates to the resolution my average graphics card could manage. Vista was a monumental failure.
I've always generally disliked Windows (and particularly hated some versions of it), but I tolerated XP because it played my games. Win7 is the first one I actually mostly like. My hardware works better with it, and all software I've tried on it still works just fine. Even with UAC on, I find it getting in my way less than XP did, since more things seem to have useful/sensible defaults compared to it and a bunch of little things here and there have been cleaned up a bit (with a few notable exceptions like the abortion the Start menu has become, not that it was any good to start out with). I actually get along with it well enough that I got rid of my Linux partition, which is saying something coming from someone who's for the most part hated Microsoft's UI design and enjoyed various Unix-based stuff since being exposed to MS-DOS and Solaris in the 80s (well, I guess SunOS back then).
I see no reason whatsoever, to move away from XP. Older quality stuff doesn't work well with newer versions.
While not much more than 3 months ago I was still hating microsoft for giving birth to their mongoloïd OS named Vista, I am absolutely loving Windows 7. Since I assembled my new PC I also installed w7, and I do not regret it. Microsoft has regained my trust.
You can install Win7 on a different partition and keep your old operating system for backup. You can then run alot of programs out of Win7 without reinstalling. Most programs need a proper setup procedure only to install registry keys and stuff so that the uninstaller and future updates know where it is located, but often they are not essential for the program itself to run.John Funk said:
Your program setups (such as bookmarks for browsers) or saved games won't be there. But it's usually easy enough to "import" them into Win7 by finding the relevant program directories in your
"/user/local settings/application data" and
"/user/application data"
directories and copying them over to the corresponding Win7 directories:
"/user/appdata/local"
"/user/appdata/roaming"
respectively.
I've been using Win7 for a long time now and have been using alot of programs I installed from WinXP without problems.
I'm sticking with XP. No point buying W7 unless it comes with another computer. I've got better ways to spend 100+ GBP than a slightly better OS. It's reassuring to know it's better than Vista, but I'm sorry for all those who rushed out and got Vista only a year or two ago, have had trouble with it, only to find it's pretty much been dropped for something else. As a Sega Saturn owner, I know what that feels like