Windows 7

[ajay]

I'm getting a new laptop soon (specs for those that like that sort of thing: Acer Aspire AS7738G, Intel Core 2 Quad Q9000, 4gb Ram, 1TB HDD, nVidia GF GT 240M 1024MB ) anyway it comes with Win7 pre-installed. Now my wife's laptop has it and I can't say I'm a huge fan of it, much prefer XP to be honest. However only serious issues would make me wipe and put XP on it. So I have questions:

Is there any Quake software (level editors, image editors, engines etc) that won't run in Win7?

As an aside, (not Quake related) would there be any advantage in running XP instead (it being less of a resource hog?)
Or would there be disadvantages in running XP; not accessing all the ram etc?

Cheers

[c0burn]

You will be fine. I've had no problems. The only issues you may have are if you run 64bit windows 7 (you should be with 4gb of ram) which can't run 16bit apps (many 32bit apps come with a 16bit installer.... for example, qME.) This is easily resolved by just running the installer on a 32bit machine and copying the %programfiles%\qME folder over to your Windows 7 machine. Or run it on a virtual machine (Windows 7 Pro comes with a free copy of XP which you can run in Virtual PC).

Windows 7 is an excellent OS and I'm sure you'll come to enjoy it. Learn to love the superbar, Win+Num shortcuts to launch pinned tasks, middle click launches a new instance of a pinned task, etc.

With Aero enabled the desktop is very responsive and snappy, and looks good too!

Hope this helps.

[ajay]

Yep, it does help, thanks. It is 64 bit. I'm keeping my current laptop (the one I am on right now in fact) until it dies, so I'll have this with XP on to run installations as you suggest, and I can just whizz them over. Cheers.

[leileilol]

Is there any Quake software (level editors, image editors, engines etc) that won't run in Win7?

I've had a friend regression test a bunch of Quake tools last year. QuArK doesn't work (at the time).

That's all I remember.

Keep in mind that 64-bit operating systems have no 16-bit support WHATSOEVER, so old tools that are 16-bit such as Mipdip WILL BREAK. Vintage command-line tools for DOS16 will also break, but there's always DOSBox to run 16-bit things well anyway.

-dibonly is also your friend

[jim]

XP might have problem with the memory. Some people say that XP would just skip the extra memory, not use it, but I had my computer just get stuck if I tried to launch it with more than total 3 or 4GB. The graphics card memory is probably included in it too.

Another thing to think about might be sound in games, at least this is true with Creative sound cards and games that use DirectSound3D, which need ALchemy to be used to restore 3D sound effects in Windows 7.

[Chip]

QuArK runs fine on Windows 7 64bit.

[Error]

I haven't had any problems running anything on Windows 7... I actually prefer it.

[mh]

No problems here either and I've been using it since the RC. It's easily the best version of Windows for other computing tasks too, and even though it does use more resources than XP, that's not the full picture - you'll find it a lot more responsive and snappy in day to day use.

One thing to bear in mind when making your decision is that it's getting to the stage when you're going to find it more and more difficult to get XP drivers for newer hardware. We're not quite there yet, but it will happen.

[frag.machine]

No problems here either and I've been using it since the RC. It's easily the best version of Windows for other computing tasks too, and even though it does use more resources than XP, that's not the full picture - you'll find it a lot more responsive and snappy in day to day use.

One thing to bear in mind when making your decision is that it's getting to the stage when you're going to find it more and more difficult to get XP drivers for newer hardware. We're not quite there yet, but it will happen.

Yup. Basically:

older hardware: better stick with XP SP3
newer hardware: jump to Windows 7

Vista ? Pretend it never happened. It's MS Bob 2009.

[leileilol]

older hardware: better stick with XP SP2

FTFY

[Spike]

I had heard that while (non-server) editions of XP utilize PAE, they only use it for the NX bit stuff, and disregard the extra 4 bits of physical addess (read: 4gb ram, minus additional hardware mappings). Presumably they do permit some drivers to map stuff outside, like video ram, if the driver asks for it.
But yeah, the reason is buggy drivers.
64bit versions have no such issues, even the home edition - they have other issues instead :)

Vista isn't as bad as people claim. Its more stable than XP in many regards, but yes, it is also slower. Its biggest problem was the availability of stable drivers when it was first released, but that's not really a problem any more. It does have some breakages, but so does XP.
7 is better than vista. undoubtably.

I still favour 2k, but the lack of drivers is a major problem now. It just looks nicer. :/

But yeah, as has been mentioned, 64-bit versions of windows (xp/vista/7) cannot run 16bit apps as the cpu operating mode does not support proper 16bit code (vm86 is no longer supported in long mode). 16bit protected mode still supposedly works, but noone ever used that.
Full emulators (virtual machines) will work, but 'simple' emulation will not. Dosbox supposedly works just fine.
32-bit versions of windows are still able to run 16bit apps just fine, or at least about as well as the previous version.
win7 is more likely to be 64bit than not, vista is more commonly 32bit, while xp is almost entirely 32bit (but not always).
Chances are, that laptop will have win7-64bit on it.

blurgh, its fine, or at least as fine as any MS system can be. :)

[frag.machine]

older hardware: better stick with XP SP2

FTFY

Actually, you get a pretty decent amount of performance improvement (+/- 10%) with SP3, besides a bunch of security fixes.

[ajay]

Thanks everyone for the replies, I'm definitely going to give Windows 7 a good go; I was fairly slow in moving from Win 98 to Xp as well; I like what I know too much!

[r00k]

I bought a new 320gig HD when i bought Win7 and installed it fresh,
keeping my entire WinXP setup intact on my old 160gb HD.
Now I have a dual boot option at startup.
Actually I think Windows 7 detected the WinXP installation and configured the dual boot option for me

[revelator]

most windows versions do

been using 7 since it came out im pretty happy with it besides a few nags (gets really cranky at times with pre overclocked gfx cards) :/ same with vista but since the kernel it uses is based on vistas its not really a surprise.

also i got the ultimate version so XP is allready there if i need it via the build in virtual machine i use it for hosting the old msvc6 compiler since installing that on win 7 itself is allmost impossible.