endlesszeal
Senior Member
My Dell 700m with 1.6 penti m and 1.25 GB was getting long in the tooth and needed a reformat. Ive been hearing great things about Win 7 and since its not my main rig, I didnt mind having a RC on my laptop. Well, Im excited and disappointed at the sametime.
Win7 is fast. XP fast. And it consumes only 500+/-15mb of RAM vs Vista SP1 which consumes 900+/-50mb. Both clean install and nothing loaded and superfetch on default. For reference, XP SP3 is 300+/-20mb. It also installed everything on my laptop except the video driver. This great because my laptop is 4-5 years old and I didnt have to rumage to drivers working properly. And its very pretty
Now for the bad part. I spent 2-3 days trying to force my video driver to work but no avail. Per Intel, they are not planning to release ANY drivers to support Win7. Vista had a WMMD driver for the Intel 825/855 chipset but it has yet to appear on Win7. Also, Win7 is shy of a couple months of RTM and then retail in Oct. Thus, those with this particular chipset are doomed to be SOL as of the moment. There are a couple of hacks and workarounds but its a hit or miss and mine was a miss.
It defaults to a 4:3 ratio and video play back is choppy. My laptop is widescreen so about 1/8th of each side is blank.
Anyway, just an FYI for those who are using an older machine and my experience with Win7. Im crossing my fingers for a driver release to fix my video because I really like Win7 so far.
Win7 is fast. XP fast. And it consumes only 500+/-15mb of RAM vs Vista SP1 which consumes 900+/-50mb. Both clean install and nothing loaded and superfetch on default. For reference, XP SP3 is 300+/-20mb. It also installed everything on my laptop except the video driver. This great because my laptop is 4-5 years old and I didnt have to rumage to drivers working properly. And its very pretty
Now for the bad part. I spent 2-3 days trying to force my video driver to work but no avail. Per Intel, they are not planning to release ANY drivers to support Win7. Vista had a WMMD driver for the Intel 825/855 chipset but it has yet to appear on Win7. Also, Win7 is shy of a couple months of RTM and then retail in Oct. Thus, those with this particular chipset are doomed to be SOL as of the moment. There are a couple of hacks and workarounds but its a hit or miss and mine was a miss.
It defaults to a 4:3 ratio and video play back is choppy. My laptop is widescreen so about 1/8th of each side is blank.
Anyway, just an FYI for those who are using an older machine and my experience with Win7. Im crossing my fingers for a driver release to fix my video because I really like Win7 so far.