Purplevision

Windows 7 should be available any day now. Before it is completely old news, I wanted to share my experience.

I have been using Windows 7 since the beta so that has been several months now. With one exception, win7 has been great and I wholeheartedly recommend it for Windows users.

I have two PC's:

Game PC

My game PC is less than a year old with a killer video card. I do one thing with it: play PC games.

When I first started using 32-bit Vista, I had problems. Some games, like The Witcher, did not work properly. So I installed Windows NT on a 2nd drive and booted into NT if a game needed it.

I have been using 64bit win7 now for several months and I have not found any games that have problems with it. I havent had to boot into NT for a long time.

the 64bit question

Why 64-bit? The 32- vs 64-bit question is one of Windows 7's biggest problems. The nerds I work with dont see a problem but good luck finding an explanation of why you should pick one or the other.

Intel has made 64 bit CPU's for a long time but Apple and Microsoft have taken very different paths towards 64-bit software. Apple has basically hidden the issue from users and the Apple experience is seamless. Microsoft asks us, the uneducated users, to choose. If you are someone that wants to know what your choices are, the 64-bit question is a confusing one.

Bottom line: if you have or want to use more than 3 GB of memory, you need to go 64 bit.

32-bit windows can only use 3GB of memory. Even if you have more installed, it wont use it. This has to do with the design of Windows itself. There are some confusing software work-arounds but that is only going to confuse normal users more.

The caveat with going 64-bit is that you will need device drivers that are specifically 64-bit. As most Windows users already know, anytime someone mentions "device driver", you have cause to be concerned.

I was certainly concerned but at least in my limited testing, I have had no driver problems. In this regard, 64-bit Windows 7 is much more stable as a release candidate than 32-bit Windows Vista was years after release.

HTPC

My other use case is our home theater PC which we use like a TIVO to record and play TV using sageTV software. More and more, we also use it to stream Netflix children's content in a browser.

This is an old PC, single core with 1GB of memory and a new ATI video card for HD content.

Vista was lousy with slow PC's and 1GB of memory. Win7 is much better.

However I am having a serious problem with 32-bit win7 -- it has some kind of codec problem with my TV software. For whatever reason, I am unable to watch over-the-air HDTV with sageTV and win7. It worked fine for cable TV content and vista worked fine for OTA content but win7 has a problem.

This OTA issue does not seem to be a problem that everyone has (lucky me) but I have blown several hours on it and for now I have no solution. Since this PC is only for watching TV, this win7 issue is a major one. I keep hoping for a patch but for now I am just not watching TV. When something I want to record comes on, I will have to find a solution or replace win7 with NT.

The other big problem I had with this system was file permissions. Win7 "improved" its file security. Evidence of this is that when I reinstalled Win7 on my existing drive, I was no longer able access any of the content. I no longer had permission to access my TV shows and such.

I found a little help content on the Internet but basically gave up, wiped my drive, and started all over. A big time waster that presages problems ahead. Being able to do a clean install was an important solution for serious Windows problems. Not being able to access your data after that gives me real concern.