DescentBB

I'm running 32 bit windows XP, that means I have to do a full install of windows 7, right? No upgrade possible?

If everything is running great in XP, what makes the upgrade to win 7 worth it?

It's available in november, right?

x2
and...
I feel like windows 7 was a rushed act of jumping the proverbial vista ship. Did they get any paint on the glass in windows 7?

If either of you had tried w7 yet, you would know its rock solid. They haven't rushed this one, and its not nearly as annoying as vista.

Having said that, if everything is running fine in XP, I'd just wait until you do your next build to get w7. Its not like its the holy grail or anything.

The only thing you would need Windows 7 for over XP is if you were planning on getting a hard drive that's larger than 2 TB. XP can't support a drive larger than 2 TB without breaking it into smaller chunks, Vista and Windows 7 on the other hand can format drives that large.

I agree with the rest of those guys. Wait for Win7 if you want to get it, rather than messing with the RC especially if everything is running fine in XP.

I have found that Win7 is a great deal more customizable than vista, and you can get rid of a lot of the security and other nagging. When I tried Win7, it was really annoying how it wanted me to clear everything, so I turned the setting down. Win7 also has superior memory management, but note that not all manufacturers and game developers support Win7 RC right now, so that might prompt you to wait until fall.

The other thing Win7 would give you that XP can't is support for more memory (i.e. more than around 3.5 GB - is the most-often reported figure). Not many have a 64-bit version of WinXP.

Vista can do that too, but at this point you really might as well wait.

The RC build is a free download from MS until the 20th of August and will remain fully usable until March next year so just grab a copy and see for yourself. It's the best way by far to get a handle on what the new OS offers and whether or not it's worth it to you:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/eval ... 53205.aspx

I've been using it since the beta and to be honest I don't see myself going back to XP. Your experience may differ of course, but with a free public beta program there's no real excuse not to at least give it a try.

I have been using the RC since about a week after it was released, and I too can't honestly see myself going back to XP either. Although I also didn't have much excuse for running XP instead of Vista once I got a copy on my system. Shortly after I got W7 RC installed, I bumped from 4 to 8 GB of memory which makes running XP, or my 32 bit install of Vista both pointless since they cap out at 3326 MB regardless.

I pre-ordered a copy of W7 Professional which I will likely install over my XP partition as soon as it arrives. Although I will ghost the XP install to another drive (likely the drive I have W7 RC installed on currently) just in case I really need something in XP that needs more hardware than the XP mode in W7 Pro can offer.

The major reason I never ran Vista was my main system at the time was my Athlon XP 3000+, a system that never had any real hope of being able to run Vista well. While I liked what I saw in the betas and I did run XP for nearly two years before finally building a system that could run that well, the AXP was already well overdue for an upgrade at that point so it hardly seemed worth it. By the time I finally managed to build a system that would do Vista justice 7 was already on the horizon. The other reason I never got into Vista was my avenues for a free legitimate copy dried up and I just couldn't be bothered with the hassle associated with going the shadier paths.

As far as XP Mode goes, while a lot has been said about this in various outlets, the reality, I believe, will be that outside of the corporate sector, it's usefulness will be limited. MS included it primarily to court business customers still running ancient software that can't/won't be updated to the Vista/7 way of doing things. The vast bulk of what consumers run now should make the transition just fine with XP Mode not being able to do much about what doesn't (games being the one that immediately springs to mind).

That's pretty much correct IMHO. XP mode is, comparatively speaking, a pain to set up (I've done it myself; you need to download Virtual PC and a kind of XP \"hard drive image\" separately; it doesn't come with Win7), and it is probably useless for getting most games to run anyway since, if I am not mistaken, it doesn't support hardware-accelerated video or anything fancy like that.

Yeah, it's basically a pre-baked XP image that you run from Virtual PC within Win7. What seperates it from simply virtualising XP though is how it's integrated into the OS. Applications installed into the virtual XP will be added to the 7 hosts Start menu and they're able to \"break out\" of the VM and run seamlessly alongside applications installed natively on the host (albeit with XP themed window borders and widgets). It's a lot like the Coherence and Unity modes provided by Parallels Desktop and VMWare Fusion (respectively) on the Mac.

I have found a good use for XP mode already actually... Some of the descent-network's descent manager tools don't work natively in W7, but do work fine in XP mode.

I haven't seen that integration stuff yet, but since it's already in RemoteApp I suppose it's not much of a stretch.