Re: Upgrading to Windows 7 -- Why Bother?

Terry R. wrote:
The date and time was Sunday, August 23, 2009 8:18:31 AM , and on a whim, Alister pounded out on the keyboard:

Terry R. wrote:
The date and time was Saturday, August 22, 2009 5:16:17 PM , and on a whim, Alister pounded out on the keyboard:

We hate Vista with a passion, but we have little choice - if we buy new Desktops, that's what we get. As an experiment, I set up two machines - identical hardware - Pentium 4 (not Dual core) 1GB RAM and put XP on one and Windows 7 RTM on the other. I swear to you that the boot times, and general usability are comparable for both machines. I have tried a Vista install on the same spec machine - Bad Idea!! runs like a dog.

This is not the case in my tests, and I have put it on two workstations also, but I have 6 OS's on these workstations. Win7 takes 2 to 3 times as long just to boot to a Desktop. I was unable to do video editing/rendering on Win7. The test workstations were AMD 3000+ with 2 gig RAM and 7,200 RPM hard drives and 512MB video cards.

Ahh, AMD hardware. Hmmm....

Our old AMD systems outperform duo core machines handily. It's not only the processors. My workstation boots to a desktop in under 30 seconds including PageDefrag. I don't see that responsiveness on other workstations.


Yes, when AMD stuff works, it does well, but my personal experience is that certain combinations of AMD processor and Motherboard chipsets don't work well at all - in XP or anything else. We have had real problems using a batch of machines which were forever falling over in one way or another. They have no weird hardware attached, just plain vanilla desktop machines from a well known supplier with the usual SATA drives, on-board NIC and mid range ATI graphics cards. We are lucky if any of them will stay up all day without crashing. And that's using XP Pro. Tried a Vista install on a couple of them and it was, if anything, worse - One refused to boot properly - even after wiping and re-installing. It would get as far as the desktop and then expire. I have not been brave enough to try a Windows 7 on one of these yet.

Alister.
.

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