Windows 7 Thoughts
Everyone else is talking about Windows 7 beta so why can’t I? I loaded the beta on a dual core Pentium 930 with 4 gigs ram and an ATI x700 pro overwriting the hard-drive which had Fedora 10 on it. I wasn’t really utilizing Linux all that much and I thought that exploring Windows 7 would be more fun right now.
First thing that I came across was that when I booted from the DVD I got a black screen. After trying it after a cold boot I finally got it working and got Windows installed. I played around with it for a while and it did run smooth but have have no illusions about that since all clean installs run smooth for a little while and Windows 7 comes very light (if you want them, you need to download a lot separate applications like Windows Live which has Messenger, Mail, Photo Gallery, Movie Maker beta, Writer, Family Safety and others). During the whole time I played with it it struck how much like Vista it was. No real big changes other than what I see as a natural progression of the software. A lot of people are hyping it as a huge change from Vista, but I’m not seeing it. That’s likely due to so much bad press about Vista convincing people it was terrible, so that logically, anything newer must be better. For the record, I like Vista – it does want I want without any issues and I never ran into any issues after I turned off UAC.
I did run into a few issues like the OpenOffice installer failing (conspiracy theorists cry foul here), and a weird error in the Houdini viewport that is persistent (below captured with Windows 7 snipping tool).
This shows up in the Houdini viewport with Windows 7 and a Radeon x700 Pro (and didn't when in Vista was on this same machine).
But I’m not sure I can say that’s a Windows issue since it could be a graphics card OpenGL issue (the ATI drivers I used were beta as well). It’s really hard to judge Windows 7 since it’s a beta – so any issues I do come across (I already submitted an issue to MS) will likely be fixed down the road. I do see Microsoft’s gearing more towards a network centric ideal with their home network feature which is also hooked into the firewall permissions, which is a natural progression in today’s world. I also liked the choices you can make to determine your default search engine, e-mail app, etc.
April 13th, 2009 at 4:58 pm
just thought i would let you know that i tried houdini out on win 7 and it worked pretty well
core 2 duo 3ghz
geforce 8800 GTX on whatever the newest driver was that they had available for win7 at the time
6gb ddr2
evga 680i motherboard (nforce)
id say your issue was probably the drivers, but like you said, who knows with beta software
April 18th, 2009 at 5:04 am
The lastest version of Catalyst display driver (9.4) just do the trick !
Worked for me on a laptop using mobility radeon HD3470. Everything’s just fine, Blender too !
Note : 64 bits version of windows 7.
May 8th, 2009 at 6:08 am
It looks the same, when you look on Houdini via Remote Desktop Connection.
October 5th, 2009 at 4:39 pm
The lastest version of Catalyst display driver (9.4) just do the trick !
Worked for me on a laptop using mobility radeon HD3470. Everything’s just fine, Blender too !
Note : 64 bits version of windows 7.
October 5th, 2009 at 4:54 pm
just thought i would let you know that i tried houdini out on win 7 and it worked pretty well
core 2 duo 3ghz
geforce 8800 GTX on whatever the newest driver was that they had available for win7 at the time
6gb ddr2
evga 680i motherboard (nforce)
id say your issue was probably the drivers, but like you said, who knows with beta software