Windows 7 Beta 1 Impressions

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#188248 8-Jan-2009 17:10

boby55: Windows 7 Public will be released to the Public on Friday (US time), Balmer Said in his keynote speech

I watched the presentation via web stream it looked good.

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Kyro

74 posts

Master Geek

#188373 9-Jan-2009 11:51

So is the beta available for download from Microsoft yet? I can't seam to find it at any of the links posted here.
(Also slightly of topic but would this be counted as free local traffic for Xnet considering microsoft.com is meant to be cached on akamai servers?

)

Pomphobetus

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#188404 9-Jan-2009 16:13

I think that teh publically available beta should be available from roughly midnight tonight (Friday) NZ time onwards. The tyranny of living in another time zone. The official beta is available now only from the subscriber network. At least for the first few million people that get it, so get it while it is hot I think.
After a week of using the unoffical release I can still recommend it. My main problem with Vista of frequent internet disconnections is totally gone with Win7. I booted back to Vista Ultimate ( a recent total reinstall from my definately genuine disk!) and within about 2 hours I was disconnected again, no other software installed other than updates. I had tried the online suggestions of stopping netword card power saving and some other tweaks too to no avail. I hope that Vista SP2 sorts this out. It seems that very many others have this problem too.
There are a few more Win7 rough edges I have found. When my computer goes to sleep I have to turn the power switch off before it will restart. Then it goes directly to the 'waking up' screen. Totally unresponsive to the keyboard, the mouse, the front power button and the reset button and needed the mains power turned off and on. So I have disabled that power setting.
There have been a few websites locking up with IE8. Geekzone was sadly one of them once. Strangely one of them was after a warning from Yahoo/Xtra homepage. "Browser not compatible" etc warnings came up. Seemed to go but then locked up with a movie preview.
DIVX/AVI files play after a vanilla installation and no additional codecs which is nice. But they were a bit stuttery so I installed the Shark007 codec pack and it was all nice again.
MS Office 2007 goes well as you would hope.
I still have not found a compatible antivirus, so not doing any risky behaviour. Any suggestions?

freitasm

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#188411 9-Jan-2009 16:41

Pomphobetus: I think that teh publically available beta should be available from roughly midnight tonight (Friday) NZ time onwards. The tyranny of living in another time zone. The official beta is available now only from the subscriber network. At least for the first few million people that get it, so get it while it is hot I think.

The beta is available now to MSDN/Technet and Connect users. The public beta will be available from Saturday 10 January 9am NZ time.

euanandrews

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#188416 9-Jan-2009 16:57

First impressions are ok...not great.

I am purely looking at the comestic changes, rather than system changes such as speed and resource use etc...

It does not pick up my Blackgold BGT3540 TV tuner...obvioulsy lack of driver support

Media Center 'Movies' folder...I selected a folder containing all my movies (800 odd) and then when I went into the MC 'Movies' section, it started 'looking for movies'....this process took a couple minutes at least, before my movie collection showed up.

Not only was it slow to load the movie collection, it then goes through the reload process everytime I leave and re-enter the Movies section.

Also the options for sorting the movies does not work properly yet....such as genre...it just sorts all the movies into 'Other'...no Action, Comedy, Horror etc etc

Playing movies in MC gave me problems too....I tried out fast fowaring the movie using the mouse and dragging the status bar which is now possible (just like Windows Media Player can)...but that caused Media Center to freeze...the movie would stil play in the background, but I could not get out of that screen without using Task Manager to crash the program.

So still buggy but this is just a Beta, I am sure it all, or most will be fixed with time.

CJbravo

51 posts

Master Geek

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#188481 9-Jan-2009 23:00

Some friends and I have been tentatively trialling this and on the whole I'm pretty impressed! Especially considering it is a beta, and just the first beta at that. Oh sure, there's a truckload of UI stuff I don't overly care for, but I'm going to give MS the benefit of the doubt at this stage and say it is just my personal preferences, and it may even have options to change these things later on.

I'm looking at W7 primarily for my media centre machine and so far I think it has huge potential, especially for us in NZ who, let's be honest, really haven't felt the love lately in Media Centre-land. Not all of that is MS's fault, but between h.264/AAC codec nightmares, Prime not wanting to play with Freeview and nobody wanting to share their TV listings for a downloadable EPG, those of us wishing for a bit of media technology convergence in our homes have had an uphill struggle to get things halfway decent, if at all.

So the good news so far is that we have been able (over chips and beer - compulsory food for beta-testing!) to use W7 to get an EPG working AND record from the two main sources we wanted (FreeviewHD on DVB-T and Prime on analogue). We used an HVR2200 to do the recordings and a satellite tuner to get the listings in the same way that has already been described here for TV Pack.

So obviously the downside is that it still requires a fair amount of hardware (2 types of tuner cards, a good UHF aerial and a satellite dish) to get it working, but the good news is it seems to work OK without having to install a truckload of codecs and other applications - this was all pretty much 'out of the box', which for me is hugely exciting.

As an aside, there's also hope for people without satellite dishes to get a guide working, too, as I remember reading a very positive thread on TGB that had input from MS's Mike Hayton. He said even though injecting listings data directly into W7's EPG was "not a supported scenario" that MS would still not be preventing this for people wanting to do it and would even be releasing a spec for the file format required. Fingers crossed I've understood this correctly and it's still cool for Mike to do this - he seemed like a pretty genuine guy from what I read.

Anyway, I'm sure there will be heaps of people more technical than I giving instructions on how to get all this sort of thing working for this beta, but I just wanted to chime in with a small message of hope for all those people like me who have struggled to realise the potential that I think we see in MS's Media Centre - this is by far the closest we've got yet! Kudos, Microsoft team, kudos.

CJ

FreddyK

84 posts

Master Geek

#188492 10-Jan-2009 00:34

I havent tried W7 yet, but plan to as soon as the beta becomes available to us mere peasents :)

@ TheBartender - Surely the reason the movie sorting isnt working is because W7 doesnt have any meta data for your movie collection? In saying that, I wonder if the reason your movie folder takes so long to process is because its trying to do just that?

@CJ - Doesnt W7 come with an MHEG-5 plugin? From what people have posted so far, it seems a bit buggy but surely this would get sorted before the offical release so we wont have to worry about a "not a supported scenario" method for injecting EPG data into it?

Anyway, I look forward to giving it a go for myself. Windows 7 is certainly shaping up to be an exciting OS release for sure, and not only from a Media Center point of view.

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CJbravo

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#188503 10-Jan-2009 01:09

@FreddyK - Thanks, I wasn't aware of that, I'll check it out. Be great if that works! I'd heard that the MHEG-5 profile used in NZ was different to elsewhere in the world, so I'd crossed that off my list of things to try.

We found that the Movies section displayed movie cover arts if each movie had a DVD VIDEO_TS structure and had the dvdid.xml file as well. But it doesn't yet seem to like avi files (even if they have matching dvdid.xml files) and these were the movies that took a minute or so to appear. Plus, as TheBartender said, it doesn't seem to cache these pics/info and so needs to reload them every time the Movies section is entered. Obviously not ideal and hopefully this will change so it doesn't just recognise DVD folders.

CJ

ajobbins

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#188528 10-Jan-2009 10:18

From http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windows-7/default.aspx :

"Want to try the Beta? Come back the afternoon of January 9"

Apparently that is Pacific Time (3 hours ahead, a day behind NZDST) so it should be online any time in the next few hours. (It's currently 1:19 p.m. PST)

stagnant16

206 posts

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#188532 10-Jan-2009 10:37

32 Bit Download is available from;

http://download.microsoft.com/download/6/3/3/633118BD-6C3D-45A4-B985-F0FDFFE1B021/EN/7000.0.081212-1400_client_en-us_Ultimate-GB1CULFRE_EN_DVD.iso

Getting a Key is another matter though as the release has been delayed due to over demand and sever problems apparently!

chakkaradeep

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#188533 10-Jan-2009 10:40

Due to heavy traffic, people may not be able to download the beta. Keep an eye at the Windows Blog for an update.

Regards,
Chaks

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ajobbins

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#188538 10-Jan-2009 11:03

stagnant16: 32 Bit Download is available from;

http://download.microsoft.com/download/6/3/3/633118BD-6C3D-45A4-B985-F0FDFFE1B021/EN/7000.0.081212-1400_client_en-us_Ultimate-GB1CULFRE_EN_DVD.iso

Getting a Key is another matter though as the release has been delayed due to over demand and sever problems apparently!

Woop. Download racing along at 1.48MB/sec - approx download time: 28 mins start to finish. Nice

DaveB

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#188539 10-Jan-2009 11:09

adamj:

Woop. Download racing along at 1.48MB/sec - approx download time: 28 mins start to finish. Nice

Yep, same here. Now that's what broadband should be all about!

ajobbins

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#188540 10-Jan-2009 11:31

DaveB:
adamj:

Woop. Download racing along at 1.48MB/sec - approx download time: 28 mins start to finish. Nice

Yep, same here. Now that's what broadband should be all about!

Now it's stalled with 210MB to go :(

chakkaradeep

799 posts

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#188552 10-Jan-2009 12:50

adamj:
Now it's stalled with 210MB to go :(

As I said earlier, Microsoft servers are currently very busy and they are adding more infrastructure to support users. So, dont be surprised if your download stops at 50%. Best is to wait for some update from Microsoft.

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