I have a notebook with Pentium M 1.86 GHz, 2 GB ram and i notice big gains in performance, higher res and smooth and fluid, well done! Hope they sell Win7 before the beta license quits. One issue was FSX Acceleration wouldn't activate with my product key from a legitimate retail box copy i own. It made my FSX install not be active anymore too.

Im not Mike, but I think the use of the word "switch" is implying abandoning Vista64? Why be so finalistic.You can however "Try W7 out"...

??

I'm installing the Win 7 Beta now.I'll install FSX on it and see how it goes.

Are you installing W7 onto a newly formatted disk?I have tried this without success.

hi,does anyone know when windows 7 SP1 will be released? :(

You are dating yourself. :) Do you remember Windows 3? Microsoft has always used version numbers internally and in some cases EXTERNALLY for their OS's. In my XP box, a 'ver' command reveals:Microsoft Windows XP {Version 5.1.2600}See how Microsoft gets version 7 out of this new version?Mike,If a person were having absolutely no problems at all with Vista, (64), would you recommend they switch to Win7 or not?

Mace, I installed W7 right on top of Vista x64. It takes much longer to install that way, but I didn't need to spend the next month reinstalling all of my applications much less gettin FS9 and FSX + all addon's reinstalled. So the whole process took about an hour or so to upgrade 350GB on a 1TB drive.I have no intent on going back to Vista, but that's just me. I'm a Technology Consultant and a Microsoft Partner so if anything starts acting up I can probably fix it or find someone who can...so my tolernace for pain may be a little higher than yours :-) If I where you, I'd Ghost my entire Vista x64 setup as an image and then install W7. If for some reason you run into major problems you an simply restore your system to its prior state without missing a beat. At the end of the day, W7 is a winner so far and indeed makes Vista look like a big black eye for Microsoft. AFAIC if ATI and Nvidia keep their drivers tuned through the beta cycle, it will be a no brainer to make the switch right now.Regards,Mike T.

Mace, I installed W7 right on top of Vista x64. It takes much longer to install that way, but I didn't need to spend the next month reinstalling all of my applications much less gettin FS9 and FSX + all addon's reinstalled. So the whole process took about an hour or so to upgrade 350GB on a 1TB drive.I have no intent on going back to Vista, but that's just me. I'm a Technology Consultant and a Microsoft Partner so if anything starts acting up I can probably fix it or find someone who can...so my tolernace for pain may be a little higher than yours :-) If I where you, I'd Ghost my entire Vista x64 setup as an image and then install W7. If for some reason you run into major problems you an simply restore your system to its prior state without missing a beat. At the end of the day, W7 is a winner so far and indeed makes Vista look like a big black eye for Microsoft. AFAIC if ATI and Nvidia keep their drivers tuned through the beta cycle, it will be a no brainer to make the switch right now.Regards,Mike T.

I'm a tech at an insurance company and I have to deal with my share of FUBAR situations.... :) I have a rather high tolerance for computer assisted pain (CAP) as a result...Anyway Win7 looks pretty interesting. The last MS OS beta I ran was I think for Win95 or 98. So it's been a while.

Are you installing W7 onto a newly formatted disk?I have tried this without success.

I downloaded the 32 and 64 bit versions. The first time I downloaded the 32bit it must have been corrupt because it failed when trying to install (Windows 7 said it could not decompress the files). Downloaded it again and no problem the second time.Here are the MD5 checksumsMay be worth testing your ISO to see if it is corrupt.

Didn't Windows start out using numbers? Windows 1.x, 2.x, and 3.x ? If successive versions kept using numbers, wouldn't the consumer versions correlated to 7.x by now ...and now MS is going back to just the number again? :(

Looks like they are only counting back to Win95. If the went back to the beginning of Windows (Which was really just a GUI on top of DOS) it would be called Windows 10! (Maybe 11 if you counted Windows 3.1 as a separate version)

It will be exactly like every other MS OS ever released, not worth a crap until at least SP 1 and probably SP2. I'm sticking with XP until I see what FS11 brings to the table.

Jay, With all due repect I would say that unless you are already using Win7 Beta you really have no idea what you are talking about. I have been running it since it's release and it runs as advertised out of the "box". I did a clean install of FSX+Acceleration yesterday and maxed out all the scenery sliders, no light bloom, water at mid 2, locked framerate at 30 and hit the throttles in the default 737. Even with framerates dipping into the mid to high teens at times it was fluid. NO stutters. When I boot Vista Ultimate my memory usage is 36% with visuals set at "Let Windows Choose the best". When I change to 'Set for best performance" as I do when using FSX I'm still using 32%. With Win7 my mem usage is 26% on boot and with visuals set for best performance Im running 22%. So I would say the for a Beta it is already delivering with a stable platform that isn't a memory hog. I would say that MS has a winner here. Just one persons opinion that is actually running Win 7 and not making blanket statements with no hands on experience. No driver problems yet with the exception of the pre-release Nvidia graphics driver causing a few artifacts. I'm sure Nvidia will work this out shortly. Craig

Long live WXP!

Well I installed it on a separate partition. Installed FSX and saw performance comparable to Vista 64, and, as others have noted, with a smaller memory footprint. And then I ran into its major faux pas. Networking. Or rather lack of, unless you're willing to cough up and upgrade all your home network machines and laptop to W7.Networking as we know it in Vista & XP, is gone. W7 has replaced it with 'Homegroups'. To share any type of file between machines you must join the hosts password protected homegroup. Not an option with Vista or XP. So, if you're running ASA, Radar Contact etc on a second machine, then that will have to be 'upgraded' to W7 as well.There's a lot of discussion going on about this. Who knows, maybe Microsoft will listen to the feedback and introduce some sort of backward compatibility before they release the RTM.

It's not "optimized" for Vista at all... just Vista "Compliant". (It will put shortcuts in the Vista games manager thing, etc. etc.) The whole "made for Vista" tag that MS was using was a very small part programming, and a very big part marketing. :) I'll probably give W7 a shot later on in the testing process (should it be available). Vista64 is running beautifully for me, and I have no need or desire to bounce anywhere else!-Greg

100% CORRECT

I don't understand anyway why people insist on putting multiple system boots on the same drive :( -- with harddisks being so cheap these days. Just plug in a new HD, install your desired OS, boot the desired system via bios (for example EVGA MB) or popup-menu (ala ASUS MB) and there, never any conflicts or problems... Gert

My initals views on Win 7 Beta To my surpise or maybe not such a surpise when I ran DXdiag, it came up with DX11Oh great M$ to run Windows 7, in 12 months people are saying, there are going to have to be a whole new series of Video cards, well maybe not, as I ran FSX and found no difference to how it performed in Vista. Although I think it could of been the Beta drivers ATI had realeased, soemtines when I ran FSX, it display settings of FSX no video card was listed. Just 0.0 and 0.01 ( I have a duel card)I hope and I'm sure many do, next version of FS wil fully support DX11 and not this preview thing we currently have, but I don't get M$ why jump to DX11 when DX10 is not fully finished or is it and FSX just isn't coded to use it!Cynical answer is to get is simmers to upgrade hardware.Although my hardware add ons like CH rudders and PFC cirrus !! Console worked fine and FSUIPC did too.Had trouble installing "My Traffic", couldn't add it to scenery libary, not sure if that is a Windows 7 issue or what!!One thing I did like about Win 7, was start up and shut down were far quciker than Vista.As one other post says here, it is on first apperance Vista with Cosmetic changes, but after only 2 days of use, need more time to judge it.Thought others might find this interesting.CheersPhil

I wonder what GPU driver most people used for windows 7. I used the windows download to download a driver fro my XFX260GTX, not the latest 181.20 for XP or vista on nivdia website as there is no option for windows7.

I can't speak for Nvidia users, but I let Win 7 install the driver for my Radeon card.Which was I quite sure was same version driver as the beta one ATI has on their web site for download, excpet when you let Win 7 install it, it says it is a certifed driver, can't work that one out!