Windows 7

[braincell]

My copy of Windows 7 is in the mail. I will install it and see if it is better than the beta version. I bought it when it was on sale for $50 in July. There is a way to install the upgrade which doesn't require Vista or XP to be installed. It's on the net. It also allows you to install an upgrade without buying the full version .

[fmpsycho]

good luck it's working fine here

[braincell]

He can maybe but not I because it's 64 bit . I just paid off that computer and it took me almost a year!

[w_ellis]

I installed Scope 5 last night on a fresh install of Windows 7 (32-bit Professional) and didn't have any issues so far. I did have a popup about not being able to add a midi driver in non-Admin mode, so have set application compatibility to run in Admin mode for the Scope app, but that's not really a problem.

I'm looking forward to getting back into using my kit, having been a bit lax for a number of years.

Cheers,
Will

[Zer]

Don't forget to run your sequencer in admin mode as well....

[braincell]

Not looking forward to installing everything all over again.

[valis]

Don't forget to run your sequencer in admin mode as well....

If the version you're running is relatively recent (Cubase5, Reaper3, Live8 etc) it should elevate priveledges itself. I need to upgrade my Wavelab to v6 for instance so it does this as well, and using 'run as admin' in properties isn't enough to get WL5 fully working...

However unlike many I'm just going fully 64bit and moving anything that doesn't work to my older 32-bit XP Xeon rig here, which houses my Scope cards. Certainly not necessary for most nor am I suggesting others do so, but I see dramatic improvements in the cpu usage of my 8-core (dual socket) Xeon and being able to use all 16GB of ram for everything (and not just graphics projects under a separate 64bit install) is welcome. Basically I'm tired of triple-booting again (or even dual booting) as for a few years under XP32 I was finally able to run one OS install, and that's been slowly getting complicated again over the last few years.

Also of note (and I haven't a clue if this works with all retail packaging) I've now received my Win7 Pro upgrade & both of my Win7 Home upgrades, and was able to clean install all of them (fresh partition and thus format) without needing any tricks to activate. They just activated first install.... Some have suggested this might be because MS is filling some of the preorders with full retail keys just to get them filled (I preordered direct from MS) but it's nice to not have to use the install over itself trick to get a clean install.

[the19thbear]

on a 2,3 dualcore with 2gigs of ram, is there really any advantage with win7 over winxp??

-Its strictly a DAW computer.
I run reaper3, and 3x6dsp scope cards.

I dont want to reinstall everything just because i have to have the newest os but no advantages.
-i want to use as little cpu as possible on my os and leave the rest for the daw tasks.

thanks alot!

[netguyjoel]

IMO...nope...I would just stick with what you have...plenty of power for the OS & Apps. Windows 7 is greedy when it comes to resources (CPU & RAM)
I just built a new box for the XITE-1 & I went w/ XP Pro with this set up.
http://forums.planetz.com/viewtopic.php?f=19&t=28176

[braincell]

It makes a difference if your card supports WaveRT. If you are happy now, it's best to stick with what you have though considering the trouble and possible missing drivers.

[valis]

Also I wouldn't say Win7 is greedy, in fact the UI elements have been pushed back into the 3d card (will use GPU ram for modern UI code) and memory usage for GDI-based apps finally consolidated into a single stack instead of allocated per app (a problem that dates back to Xp & perhaps Win2k.) I wouldn't say you'll see performance improvements on older hardware though.

For instance on all of my machines Win7's DPC latency is much higher, usually idling around 110-150µs and bubbling up to just above 200µs on idle. Xp for me is 1/8th that or less (20-40µs at idle). Part of this though is the support in Vista for modern timing mechanisms based off of the HPET timer, and support for advanced power management etc. Things you'll also really need a late computer to take advantage of (and these power management features are often disabled to improve performance on audio workstations as well).

There are other refinements as well and certainly it's the way forward for windows based apps. It's much better than Vista was at launch (given that it's "Vista sp3" anyway) and feels considerably more solid than Xp was starting to feel on my hardware (8 cores & 16GB ram is well overspec'ed and not very useful on Xp32). Improvements in file system handling, awareness of SSD's (becoming more important, to disable defrag and other such routines automatically and TRIM etc...) Nothing essential, but nice to have.

[braincell]

There are thousands of little improvements.

[valis]

Well in addition to the thousands of little improvements, I must say that it's nice to be on an OS that fully utilizes my hardware. I've got my installations mostly taken care of for apps, and most of my OS-level tweaking done (including minimalizing my mem footprint, background tasks and services and tweaking the UI and swapping out bootscreen/etc to be less...designed by committee.) I've basically been using this for 6-7 days now and can feel the difference in responsiveness of most of my apps as well as improved stability overall for windows (compared to xp of course, which I think was struggling to manage resources by the end there.)

I certainly didn't feel this way about Vista on my two attempts at migrating to it (xp64 was continually easier to use and faster for my work.) Sp3 this might be but maybe 3 really is the magic # for MS still...anyway enough gushing (I still need to get a new mac soon too.)

[braincell]

Vista got a bad name because of cheap laptops. Everyone blamed Vista for their new computer being slow because they heard Vista sucks. It was actually about the same speed as XP but nicer. I just replaced a friend's XP with Windows 7. Her laptop got bogged down with spyware, viruses and bit rot I think. It's fast now. Hopefully she will be more careful about what sites she goes to and get updates.

[garyb]

i doubt that there will EVER be a "certified" driver. there is already a driver, and there will certainly be a 64bit version if all goes well. "certification" is extremely expensive. a driver is enough.

[braincell]

Certification is a scam to make money for Microsoft.

[valis]

Vista got a bad name because of cheap laptops. Everyone blamed Vista for their new computer being slow because they heard Vista sucks. It was actually about the same speed as XP but nicer. I just replaced a friend's XP with Windows 7. Her laptop got bogged down with spyware, viruses and bit rot I think. It's fast now. Hopefully she will be more careful about what sites she goes to and get updates.

I think you may have come into Vista a bit late there kiddo. Installing it on 2 different completely overspec'd machines (1 dual dual-core Xeon with 8GB ram and later this dual quadcore with 16GB ram) performance was certainly not on par with Xp. Drivers were buggy for 64bit and many were still just out of Xp64 (server2003) 'initial beta' status, especially nvidia & ATI drivers. Since the Aero interface was suffering buggy drivers (which affects audio application performance) and the 'legacy' UI mode chewed up user ram like crazy (and no longer supported hardware 2d accelleration on your gpu btw, so was a bigger cpu load), 32bit Vista wasn't a perfect party yet. Even with disabled Aero wasn't even close to Xp's mem usage even with indexing off, UAC off, readyboost off and tweaked services etc.

Vista sp1 & now sp2, that's a different story (and even a different kernel from pre-sp1) although the lack of GDI accell was still an issue, just less so for multicore machines that weren't fully utilized otherwise.

[braincell]

It may have been SP2 can't remember but I never used Aero and switched from ATI to Nvidia.