DescentBB

A combination of trial, error and internet research led to me nailing AVG as the culprit. It's not the only cause of this particular BSOD though, it's not even the only A/V program that causes it (other users have reported it with Avast, Kaspersky and everyone's favourite: Norton, as well). It's a networking issue that's exacerbated by a number of factors, not just A/V software. I only started seeing the tdx.sys BSOD quite recently though (maybe in the last week). I have a feeling whatever's causing it in AVG snuck in as part of the last big update but I'm not game enough to try it again for a long while after what I had to go through to figure it out this time.

Even without tweaking this, I think it feels just as fast or faster than XP Pro on this machine (Barton Core 3200 1.5g-ram geforce6600)Though I did turn off the fancy interface whizbangs. only some minor problems, like, my add-in sata card the drivers won't work for, so my raptor drive won't fire up... had to jerry rig some drivers for the motherboard and video card since support for them stopped with XP.... The scanner doesn't work on my officejet (no fix for that)which only used to be a problem for 64bit OS's, but my laserjet works fine.

Other than that, I find its pretty stable on this system, I've left it on for days on end with no performance degredation or crashing even coming out of standby which I see as a great improvement over XP or Vista.

The only other strange thing is using filezilla, I can't drag and drop files TO the desktop (I can drag FROM the desktop though) I have to do it in the filezilla window to the folder. Wierd.

I like it so far. I'm running AVG and have had no problems. And, I've only been using the Windows firewall so far, and so far, I've not had anything bad hit me so, there seems to be improvement there also.

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The common thread for my particular issue seems to be mapped network drives on Samba-based servers. You start moving data to/from them with the A/V running and eventually you get the BSOD. Uninstall the A/V and it goes away. It only started happening in AVG with the last major update (233). The build I downloaded when I first installed W7 (176) seemed to be fine.

The biggest issue with Windows 7 though is that MS don't really seem to have done much to differentiate it from Vista. Sure, there's the \"new\" taskbar and lots of the annoyances in Vista have been toned down or fixed entirely but for the most part is looks and feels exactly like Vista. This is largely intentional, MS aren't really claiming that W7 is anything all that new and original (at least not anywhere near to the point they did with Vista), but by not doing more to distance it from Vista they risk the same lukewarm adoption - especially in the crucial XP-holdout market they're desperately trying to attract. MS are aware that, at this point, peoples continued hate of Vista is largely psychological so hopefully we'll see some movement on this before release.

Even if its basicly just Vista SP2 its still a great improvement.