The Official PC building thread - 4th Edition

I know your one of the few that I know of that thinks that Vista was better than XP. But in my own opinion Ireally think Vista sucked and MS took me for $ like they did on XP64 bit. But I have three OS I should've never bought. One was Win XP 64bit, the other was Vista business class, and the third is Win8.[possible I could change my mind on 8 the more I play with it].

 

Once you get past Metro it's fine but having to boot into that horrible UI is too much for me. When someone comes up with a work around for the Metro nonsense I'll start using it probably.

 

Ripper. I use DVD rebuilder frequently on Windows 7 X64. Not one problem, not one tweak. But then, I don't use the UAC. It's the first thing I disable. Silliest thing I've ever seen in a windows OS!

 

I'm using Classic Shell on Win8 with a Win7 menu. And your absolutely right how in the hell they ever came up with Metro is beyond me.Standard games don't come loaded and you have to sign into the Windows store for them if you use free your limited to how many games to play such as in the solitary.

 

There are several, although I don't think any are perfect. If you're willing to put up with the start menu taking a while to open sometimes, ClassicShell is a good free method.

 

I tried 2 others that were free and ended up with Classic Shell that boots into the desktop.And as far as I can tell your absolutely right none are perfect or half way there so far

 

So why get windows 8, if people want to dumb it down? I'll try to answer that.

Windows 8 code, handles state of the art processors better, correct? Essentially, all around optimized code. But can't/won't windows 7 get some or all of those refinements?

 

I perceive Windows 8 as an aesthetic upgrade really, it looks a lot nicer than W7 imo, and it boots a lot faster, but that's about all that wows me about it.
The double whammy for me was the opportunity to get a legitimate license for Windows on several machines for cheap.

 

Price was what sold me to try it out but it was an upgrade that took out the Win 7 pro that was legal.Big L on my forehead like when i got married.

 

That hasn't happened to me, but then I deliberately used the "clean install" method.

 

ZoSoIV,

I bought two WD 1TB Black Edition drives. They had been on sale for $79.00 during the black Friday sales. I suspect if you keep looking, the price will go down again before Christmas. I bought them for storage, but I wanted more speed when I transfer files, so I settled for The WD black, since its already a fast drive. A 5 year warranty doesn't hurt either!

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136533

Best Regards,
Russ

 

cool Russ thanks just what I'm looking for..want a quality/fast HDD and they fit the bill..just bought an external Toshiba 1TB for 69.00 to backup what i have now to get ready for the new build..seems to be a great HDD so far

ok looking at this core ok guys?

Intel Core i7-3770K Ivy Bridge 3.5GHz (3.9GHz Turbo) LGA 1155 77W Quad-Core Desktop Processor

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819116501

and need a Asus MB also? not really gaming anymore but encoding DVDs etc so def need a high quailty MB

thanks for the input guys

 

I should've explained better. When i upgraded to Win8 from Win7 activation code was taken for 7 so I can't go back to 7 with the old code except to buy it again or borrow a code.

 

Yeah I think it was merely a UAC issue, which should be disabled for any half competent PC user anyway.

 

Oman7,
I don't think so! If I did, I bought two of them that didn't work properly. The point being that I bought M$ so I wouldn't have compatibility problems. It says right on the box that they are Win 7 compatible! It sometimes slows the computer to a crawl, literally so slow that the mouse pointer appears not to move at all. The HDD light goes on solid, and it appears it's locked up, but it isn't, it's just in super slow motion. I mean come on, who's kidding who here? I/O problems with something as simple as a wireless mouse, in the 21st century? ROFLMSOAO!! It did it with the 10909t, the PIIx4-965, and the FX-8320! The advantage of having two of everything, except the CPU, and testing everything, I concluded it's the Mouse or a problem with it's software.

Another more serious problem, is disabling Older software claiming that your computer might be at risk so it's been shut down to prevent damage to your computer. Sometimes you get a fix in a day or two, or it could be months. I use XP Office. I've used it since I originally bought XP. It was the first productivity App I bought for it! I can write an entire book, with illustrations and pictures, in any language in the world, and provide the printer the "plates", either electronic or real! to print it with! I have CS6, CS9 and Enterprise (CS10 I think) as well. My preference is to use XP-Office, that I paid close to $400 for originally! It's also not limited to one computer! I don't appreciate it when it doesn't work!

The GUI is the biggest joke I've even seen. Do you realize that you can get so lost in the hopelessly endless, "if this doesn't work try this" trap", that you can use up most of your resources before you ever find what you are looking for.

Windows media player, is another total piece of crap! Half the time, Sub Titles don't work, or only partly work, with no cue for starting the movie again, where it was previously stopped. It offers literally no video controls, half assed scaling, so the picture doesn't always play full screen side to side, when you want it to.

What we got with Win 7, is low wage, just out of school programers, who sacrificed performance and function for bling! Here's a list of things that are missing from various parts of Win 7!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_features_removed_in_Windows_7

I'll warn you ahead of time, what M$ has done. It's not just that things are missing, but some are only partly missing, and function only within certain parts of the GUI, but not all of it. In effect, they are blocking some components of the GUI system, so they can be used by the parts of it that do work!

It also affects third party software, like AVG, where you can't access the virus vault, because of the work arounds in the GUI. What will really drive people nuts is that the real oddity is that some programs will run perfect from the desktop, but not from the program list, and vice versa! That should be fun!

The bottom line is that Win 7 is not a complete OS, it's a work in progress that contains many kludges. It's been 3 years since Win 7 was released, isn't it about time for some progress? I think that's a fair question!

Best Regards,
Russ

 

Yeah, the progress is called windows 8. With its own set of problems.

You know what - XP is a pretty good OS, lol.

Sam, what do you mean, "looks a lot nicer." How can something look nicer? - the type of see-through borders on the windows - what? I'm serious and not being a bit sarcastic - I do like the glassy borders as started with vista - I forget what you call it - and I see that effect continued with Win 7 - so what happens with 8 that makes it look a lot nicer? (Sorry - I haven't googled it or seen any youtubes.)

Support or no support, I run XP on all my stuff, and will continue to do so for many years to come, way after support has ended, because I know how to fix it when it breaks.

Eventually hardware will come out that will no longer run under XP - and THEN I'll have some tough decisions to make - but XP is the first widespread NT-based OS after Windows 98, and all of the rest are also NT-based OS's, so I would think most things that come out will continue to run on XP - state of the art games not included which I run on windows 7.

Also, I do not run XP on any rig with more than 4 gigs memory, which means the 8 gig phenom with 1/2 gig 3650 graphic card which is used as an HTPC running under Vista, and the 8 gig 9450 with 3 gig X 2 crossfire 7950 gaming rig running under Windows 7 (and XP on the other drive - booting to XP through bios as Sam had once recommended.)

Having become familiar with Vista on the HTPC, and seen glitches here and there and everywhere, even something as simple as getting it to register the type of screen saver you want - and not change that setting back on the next login (it will not lock it in on one user account - seriously) - I don't really see what you mean, Shaff, about Vista being so good - BUT - I will say this in its favor, Vista has the all-time BEST screensavers. Yes, it's true. LOL

Yeah, I took the UAC off of my windows 7, (mostly because the Sleeping Dogs life cheat ... er I meant - trainer - said to do that) and it's so nice to be able to load Trixx or whatever, without the screen dimming and all that BS - BUT - isn't the real issue if a virus attempts to get control - isn't all the checking supposed to increase security?

Rich

 

You complain about incomplete OS? Your beloved XP will have had updates and hotfixes every month for the last 10years up till the end when they just arbitrarily say "we wont support it anymore". 10 years of fixes, isn't it time for progress?

 

Windows Vista and newer have a different version of the NT kernel compared to XP. Software compatibility is sometimes hurt by this and other things and that will only get worse as time goes on. This is largely because of the 64 bit initiative, but also true for a lot of 32 bit software as well due to newer compilers that aren't well-supported by XP sometimes being used to optimize for more modern machines better.

Also, for those of us who remember all the way back to before XP, XP wasn't really great from launch to its second service pack. Compared to Windows 2000, it was like Vista compared to XP SP3. Horribly bloated, inferior performance on machines of the time, a lot more driver instability, etc. It took XP way too many years before I could call it great for me to mock newer versions of Windows yet.

Besides, I don't really have any trouble with Vista through 8 right now. Driver compatibility with modern hardware is fairly great (it might be annoying for some of my 90s to early 2000s stuff to not have proper drivers, but over ten years old, that starts to become understandable and it's not MS's fault anyway), performance on modern hardware is fairly great, and so on. Honestly, I also like Windows 8 more than 7. Some things are a lot faster and I've never had the slowness issues that I sometimes read about. I find that these issues are usually caused by having the wrong USB drivers, just a suggestion to look into. I've seen them at Tom's forums a few times and managed to get the issue fixed every time or someone else did by posting links to the right driver(s) to use.

 

Very well put Blazorthon!

 

XP was never bloated but it did have problems with compatibility/driver issues at first and wasn't stable until SP1 when it became a good OS at that point. Vista is still bloatware crap that can't run older programs, but Windows 7 is pretty good and unlike Vista I can run old programs and games that I can't run with Vista 32 or 64 versions. XP had problems because they made a big jump from their gaming OS and business OS's, which were separate prior, and they merged them together, ME didn't help in the conversion either.

I use AVG and it runs fine on Windows 7. I've installed it on many PC's and never had one problem attributed to the OS or in AVG's operation. This is with both free versions and full suite packages too.