The Official Windows 7 Thread

Andrew Wood · Wed 11 Nov, 2009 12.03

Not when you see the back of the t-shirt...

TG · Wed 11 Nov, 2009 14.51

I got the same email - they seem happy now I've been able to confirm I'm a Tesco employee so hopefully mine'll be here soon

Inspector Sands · Thu 19 Nov, 2009 12.35

cwathen wrote:I gave up on AVG shortly after version 8 came out, it may have been much better featured but I found it to have a huge performance hit (both in itself and on the rest of the system) compared to the previous version.

That explains a lot, I got AVG a couple of months ago after I caught up on several years worth of windows updates. I thought it was those that had slowed my machine, reckon it's probably AVG now. It keeps telling me about version 9 which is out now, I wonder if that's any better

I've been on Comodo Internet Security for the past year or so. Out of the box, it too is a bloated and intrusive product, but if you turn off everything except the basic anti-virus, it's quite snappy.

Is Comodo free? Apart from the Windows security are there any other good free virus scanners?

Gavin Scott · Thu 19 Nov, 2009 12.49

Inspector Sands wrote:Is Comodo free? Apart from the Windows security are there any other good free virus scanners?

I'll add my name to that.

What was this thing I saw that runs your AV scanner off a USB stick - would this sort my sluggish windows woes?

aconnell · Sun 22 Nov, 2009 20.09

Gavin Scott wrote:
Inspector Sands wrote:Is Comodo free? Apart from the Windows security are there any other good free virus scanners?
I'll add my name to that.

What was this thing I saw that runs your AV scanner off a USB stick - would this sort my sluggish windows woes?

It's most probably the Yoggie Gatekeeper Pico. I've thought about getting this to avoid slowing down my computer too much. I don't know about prices and subscriptions though.

Windows 7 seems to make things run much faster in general. AVG doesn't slow it down too much. Looking back at Windows Vista, it really was so slow and annoying.

Jovis · Sun 22 Nov, 2009 20.26

http://portableapps.com/apps/utilities

Inspector Sands · Tue 24 Nov, 2009 17.02

Hello from my new Windows 7 machine, gradually getting the hang of things but can anyone help with the one major problem I've had today...

I have a Maxtor portable hard drive and for some reason Win 7 treats it as a 'Local Drive' rather than a 'Removable Drive' therefore when I'm done and I want to disconnect it I can't! I had to turn the whole thing off first :roll:

Anyone know how to avoid this?

lukey · Tue 24 Nov, 2009 19.10

Inspector Sands wrote:Hello from my new Windows 7 machine, gradually getting the hang of things but can anyone help with the one major problem I've had today...

I have a Maxtor portable hard drive and for some reason Win 7 treats it as a 'Local Drive' rather than a 'Removable Drive' therefore when I'm done and I want to disconnect it I can't! I had to turn the whole thing off first :roll:

Anyone know how to avoid this?

IIRC, since Vista, because external drives no longer have write caching enabled by default, they've de-emphasised the need to 'safely remove' them, so disconnect away.

cat · Fri 04 Dec, 2009 14.50

Out of curiosity...

"As a Mac owner" I am not au fait with windows 7. But I do have Vista installed on my Mac because some of my work software is not Mac compatible. More fool me. I love the Mac for graphic design stuff I do and it's very pretty and the like, but come the next few months I'll be doing a lot more travelling for work and don't fancy lugging around expensive Macbook Pro and leaving it on a train somewhere.

So...

I want to get a relatively cheapish, portableish Windows 7 laptop that I can travel around with.

a) Is Windows 7 resource hungry, and will it work even half decently on a compact/cheap (300/400 quid) machine?

b) Any recommendations within that price range?

Pete · Fri 19 Mar, 2010 12.03

Apparently the annoying hardware requirement for XP Mode is being removed in a new update so those without the processor based virtualization can now run the thing too.

cwathen · Fri 19 Mar, 2010 19.42

Apparently the annoying hardware requirement for XP Mode is being removed in a new update so those without the processor based virtualization can now run the thing too.

Not sure that this is a good thing actually. Recently I've got new hardware and now have a CPU which supports hardware virtualization which has made a staggering difference both to the virtual machine performance and to the ability of the virtual machine to co-exist with applications on the host machine.

Before that I used VPC for many years without hardware virtualization and it was always a case of EITHER the virtual system OR the host system can run fine (well, more sort of OKish really), but not both at the same time because the drain on the processor to do the emulation completely in software is huge.

Windows XP mode was designed to allow applications in the XP virtual machine to run just as well as on a native XP machine, and also for those applications to be seemlessly and transparently run alongside native applications in Windows 7, which still needs to perform well with the virtual environment in use. That means A) the virtualization has to be quick and B) the host system cannot be allowed to take a huge performance hit just because XP mode is in use.

With that aim in mind, it seemed prudent of Microsoft to require hardware virtualization for XP mode so that it could be used as intended, and I'm not sure how useful the feature will be without it.