>so 3 explorers show up as 3 seperate items, not one grouped item

So, the OS is officially released now. Ars Technica has a mildly useful article on the whole thing.

Windows 7 is here - Ars Technica

And for those of you who aren't sure if the OS will install fine, there's also a "compatibility center" for addressing that: http://www.microsoft.com/windows/com...s/default.aspx

Not sure how useful it would end up being for you guys, but there you go. I went ahead and got the Student version for 30 bucks so I just have to backup my files in a bit and do a clean install (You can't do an upgrade from the RTM/RC versions of Win7 to the retail apparently, go figure).

I installed Win7 on a different partition than my WinXP install, yet I'm not given a boot selection screen when I start my PC up. Can't find how to add it in msconfig like I would in XP, can anyone clue me into it?

I have the x64 version installed and everything works fine. The only program that has some problems is Maya...

RR, I'd recommend going to a windows 7 forum of sorts to figure out how to dual boot win 7 and xp. By default win 7 will take over boot from what I hear.

This isn't that helpful, but I have XP and 7 on different partitions and I get the OS selection screen every time I boot up.

An additional note for anyone who got the 30 dollar version via a university email address. The OS will download into a single file, and after unzipping that file, you won't have a tidy clean ISO to turn to a disc. There's a method to get around that annoyance and have it DVD ready :)

How to make a DVD of that student-only Windows 7 you bought for $29.99

For Windows 7 users (RTM/RC/Etc.,) a small change in the command line instruction might be needed.

How to make a DVD of that student-only Windows 7 you bought for $29.99

And some Vista 32-bit users ALSO had troubles with installing, and funny enough, the same basic steps are listed here.

Windows 7 student upgrade hell - Apple 2.0 - Fortune Brainstorm Tech

Anyway, I tried the alternative command line and it worked fine for me. If you need any assistance, give me a PM.

Mine extracted right into an .iso that I downloaded from my school. =\

I made up a neat little iso but I can't seem to burn it to jack shit, so I guess my DVD-RW drive is just getting old or whatever. Can't tell if it's the iso that's corrupt or my burner.

Also, apparently the Windows 7 Upgrade is a bit of marketing hype. The version sold to students at $30 is a full version of Windows 7.

Additional Spam:
I dunno if that solution is only supposed to work for Vista or SP3, because I'm still using XP SP2. I contacted Digital River to see about getting an actual disc which will of course take forever.

I have two questions and a request, regarding the student deal of $29.99!

1. The version on offer appears to be Windows 7 Home Premium. I'm currently on XP Professional. Will I miss anything?

2. Will there be ... difficulties (say, with activation and stuff) if I were to ask one of you guys to buy this for me? The promotion site says this is non-transferable, and it says Microsoft may demand full retail price if it discovers you aren't a current student, so... :tpg:

And the request.

Assuming the answer to both questions are "No", can I rent the use a US-based .EDU e-mail address? :D

Welp, tried burning some simple data to a DVD-R and my whole system froze up. Good jorb, PIONEER.

Suppose I'll have to use the bootable flash drive method and have a friend burn it onto a cd for me.

If you have any valid .edu email address, I think you should be good. There was a while where some australian organization was giving out free .edu email addresses, but Digital River caught on and I don't think they're honoring those purchases.

Also, to the first question, Win7 Professional is also available at the same price. Of course being the assholes that they are, they've obscured the link in the purchase page for the Professional version. I think there are a great deal of features that you will miss if you get the Home edition, and while Win7 Pro is still mildly crippled, its not nearly as bad as Home, which would likely be hell for someone like you.
See: Windows 7 editions - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

I have a valid .edu.SG but no .edu address, unfortunately.

Hahaha so the 4 gig flash drive I bought doesn't have enough space and I had to clear out its partitions to fit the ISO, so now there's a functioning ISO on the drive but I can't boot from it. This after going through DVD-Rs like toilet paper before realizing my DVD-RW is bad. I've spent about 20 bucks so far just trying to get this fucking thing to work.

Just have to call in some favors, I guess.

Brady, were you burning the 64 bit version from a 32-bit operating system?
That has been known to cause some serious issues.

Brady, you know you don't just drop the .iso on the USB drive, right? You need to do some sort of install thing onto your current HD and then move the files over.

Uh, how would I have an ISO if I didn't compile it myself from the Digital River files motherfucker!? :cool:

I figured that the actual USB/DVD transfer tool that microsoft provided was designed specifically for 32-bit operating systems, since that's where the massive amount of groaning is coming from. The people who had significant gains to make in the transition.

Additional Spam:
Just because I never used my DVD-RW to burn any DVDs until the day I needed it most and it had already given up the ghost long ago doesn't mean I don't know a thing or two about mounting isos. Gimme a lil credit, fellas.

Additional Spam:
Everything I've done has already been tested and proven by people who know way more about this stuff than I do, I just can't for the life of me get these goddamn files into a format I can boot from.

So I finally get the iso onto a dvd, try to boot from it and get the message
The disc is obviously in my drive, since I already know the DVD-RW can't write should I just go ahead and get a new one?

Additional Spam:
I booted from my Windows XP cd just fine.

i'm debating getting win7, but there are a couple of things i want to know first -

1. does it run faster, slower, or about the same speed as Vista?
2. does it have a lot of bugs? i can't really afford to have my laptop crashing all the time because i need it for school.

I don't have much experience with Vista, but as far as I know, it runs faster. It doesn't have as much crap to bog down the system. And, you can actually get away with running 7 on a lesser system.

As far as bugs go, I've not run into any--but again, that's just with my setup, which is a fairly well-to-do desktop.

To sum it up, "It's what Vista should have been"

Been running W7 x64 since beta. Love it. I liked Vista, but Windows 7 is truly the successor of XP. I bought the 3 license OEM Windows 7 Ultimate x64 for the two rigs I built at home, and into my laptop. Works great! Have not had to run WinXP mode yet...

My score is 7.7 in the system ranks.

I went from XP to 7 and am loving it. I tried vista but was having too many issues so I reverted to XP.

1. While there are certain areas of the OS that definitely feel snappier than before, what's more important in my mind is that if you have a lot of things going on, 7 doesn't bog down nearly as quickly as Vista did. I went and did some reading and that apparently has to do with using video memory as opposed to main memory to store windows, so if you're putting 7 on a really really crap graphics card your mileage may vary.

2. I've only bluescreened once on Windows 7 so far, and I haven't been able to reproduce it, so I'm taking it as a bizarre happenstance. 7 as a whole is remarkably stable, and this is on a laptop that is either on or on standby 90% of the week and I usually only reboot for Windows Update.

The only thing I've run into so far is just minor incompatibility issues with very specific programs. Every time I log in, my university's system insists that I am not running a secure OS because it's not XP SP3 or Vista SP1, and there was one game whose name escapes me right now (some free to download shooter) that doesn't seem to do anything other than go to a black screen. Pretty much everything that works on Vista works on 7.

One quick thing; for anti-virus on Windows 7, I recommend Microsoft Security Essentials. Believe it or not, it's free, it's lightweight, and it's incredibly uninvasive. In the months I've been using it, I've never had it bitch about a program and block it. It sits there using 3MB of RAM, which is basically nothing, and scans don't hog my entire computer the way AVG used to. The only downside to it, really, is that unlike other antivirus suites there isn't much in the way of customization. I don't particularly mind it, because I know unless I let someone else on my laptop the odds of me actually coming across a virus are next to nil, so all I need is something sitting there to call me an idiot if I click on something I shouldn't.

Wow, that was a long ramble. Sorry about that.

tl;dr: 7 is stable, fast, well-made. Microsoft Security Essentials is the best anti-virus for it.

I've also noticed that it seems to run a defrag process in the background at all times. After using Win7 for a while and cleaning out a shit ton of files from one of my HDs, I checked with defrag how my drives looked and all of them were at 0% fragmentation!

(Or it could just be Win 7's defrag utility isn't telling me the right thing.)

There are a few things they changed that I'm a little annoyed about. One of the features I miss the most and I can't seem to find is in the status bar for folders on XP it would give you how many objects were in the folder, how much space the files in the folder are taking up, and where the files are located. Now it only seems to give info like dimensions and filetype when I click on it, no size info. :mad:

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/09...sc/Capture.png

Well, if you don't have anything in a folder selected, it tells you how much is in the folder you're viewing.