Windows 7

Originally Posted by Hawkeye

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.

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.

Jam it back in, in the dark.

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

How ya doing, buddy?