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is shifting to windows 7 a good idea ?


chow choppe
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hi everyone

 

i am planning to buy a laptop for myself and have narrowed down on studio 1550 from DELL.

now the problem is that they dont offer win xp 64 bit which i am using till now and i am quite comfortable with it.

Dell is either giving vista 64bit or win xp 32, bit and another option i.e win7 64bit.

 

is it a good idea to buy a laptop with win7 64bit.

 

will the following softwares, that i use everyday ,run on it?

 

Autocad 2009 , 2010(if i upgrade)

3dsmax 2008 & 2009

Adobe photoshop CS4 64bit extended

MSOFFICE 2007 or later?

 

i am into architectural visualizations so experts here might know what all do i need and tell me if there's any issue with any of these softwares with windows 7

 

Thanks a ton

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Windows7 will be a better choice than Vista, though it is really just a matured, and better coded version of Vista. Head to head, Xp64 will be faster than Win7. XP64 simply requires fewer resources to run efficiently.

 

Think about it, XP was designed to run on computer technology circa 2002 or so. Computers have increased there speed a lot in that amount of time, while XP mainly stayed the same, while the code was refined to run better.

 

Windows7 is lighter weight than Vista, but not as light as XP.

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  Crazy Homeless Guy said:
Windows7 will be a better choice than Vista, though it is really just a matured, and better coded version of Vista. Head to head, Xp64 will be faster than Win7. XP64 simply requires fewer resources to run efficiently.

 

Think about it, XP was designed to run on computer technology circa 2002 or so. Computers have increased there speed a lot in that amount of time, while XP mainly stayed the same, while the code was refined to run better.

 

Windows7 is lighter weight than Vista, but not as light as XP.

 

I'm not so sure that this is universally the case. I know several people (so yes, this is purely anecdotal) who've found that Win7 ran more efficiently on their low-spec note/webbooks than XP did. Vista ran like an absolute dog on them, obviously, and XP was way better, but apparently Win7 is very good at scaling to hardware.

 

Obviously this doesn't mean that Win7 will be faster with better hardware than XP, I'm just saying that it shouldn't be disregarded until people have done some proper tests with it, because it really isn't just a slightly more efficient version of Vista.

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at the moment we have Vista64, XP64 and Win764 running on our renderfarm

 

Vista killed many of the machines so we stuck xp64 on. As a test we also added win7 and I must say I'm quite impressed. Intallation was smooth, especially with Max. Problably the quickest I have ever had.

 

Rendering times was a bit faster (10%+ in some cases) and they have been stable. We had an animation rendering over two weeks, running 24/7, no problem.

 

Soon we will be testing how ACAD and Revit run on them

 

jhv

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I ordered the Win7 upgrade at the old price ($50 for Home Premium, which is going on my home desktop and my Bootcamp). I still like XP but it's not 2002 anymore and I'm ready for something new.

 

BTW I just got the Snow Leopard upgrade and aside from the lack of a working version of iStat Menu I'm suitably impressed. Safari is crazy fast. I'm hoping Aperture 3 is imminent with Snow Leopard optimization and OpenCL...

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  AJLynn said:
I ordered the Win7 upgrade at the old price ($50 for Home Premium, which is going on my home desktop and my Bootcamp). I still like XP but it's not 2002 anymore and I'm ready for something new.

 

BTW I just got the Snow Leopard upgrade and aside from the lack of a working version of iStat Menu I'm suitably impressed. Safari is crazy fast. I'm hoping Aperture 3 is imminent with Snow Leopard optimization and OpenCL...

 

too technical terms for me

didnt understand even a single word :-(

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  AJLynn said:
I ordered the Win7 upgrade at the old price ($50 for Home Premium, which is going on my home desktop and my Bootcamp). I still like XP but it's not 2002 anymore and I'm ready for something new.

 

BTW I just got the Snow Leopard upgrade and aside from the lack of a working version of iStat Menu I'm suitably impressed. Safari is crazy fast. I'm hoping Aperture 3 is imminent with Snow Leopard optimization and OpenCL...

 

AJ,

 

I was thinking of this myself on my Macbook pro 3,1.

My assumption is a clean install is not required, I'm rolling bootcamp with W7 rc with max & PS on it. Only problem is every time i leave & enter bootcamp, w7 and reboot Max or PS, I have to re-register. This happen to you?

 

btw, why use Aperture over photoshop? just curious.

 

cheers

Edited by scotty
sp
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I havn't tried Bootcamp yet. As for clean installs, I cloned my drive, then clean installed, then used Migration Assistant, but I've been having glitchy issues and I kind of wish I'd done fresh software installs and only migrated my user files.

 

Aperture and Photoshop are completely different. Aperture is more like Lightroom. I use Aperture and Photoshop together - Aperture for keeping photos organized, tagging, rating, importing/exporting, RAW conversion, color and curves, etc., and Photoshop for... well, the Photoshop stuff. Anything not done to the entire image at once. Aperture has an edit in Photoshop command that makes a PSD version in its database and opens it in Photoshop, and edits roundtrip.

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  AJLynn said:
BTW I just got the Snow Leopard upgrade and aside from the lack of a working version of iStat Menu I'm suitably impressed. Safari is crazy fast. I'm hoping Aperture 3 is imminent with Snow Leopard optimization and OpenCL...

 

The widget version of iStat is working fine with me on 10.6, you could try that instead. I've been looking for Aperture "rumours" for a while - nothing worth noting...yet.

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  • 11 months later...

I tried to go to W7 a few months ago and had to reformat both of my machines and reinstall XP64, I lost about 3 days doing this. There were several problems I ran into which made the upgrade imposable, first W7 would use over a Gig more ram than XP64 did just to render out the same scene. This in my opinion is one of the main reasons not to use it especially if your scenes are memory intensive as W7 will start using the swap disk sooner and this will kill your render times not to mention that you might just run out of ram all together and it will crash. The second problem I was having was the Nvidia display drivers and Max 2011 were just complete crap running under W7, it was so bad there was no way I could run Direct X and had to go back to Open GL. That doesn't mean that the Open GL fixed everything it was still painfully slow and locked up quite a bit. I can't honestley say what the benifit of W7 is beyond having support for iTunes again.

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I'm working now in w7/64 and for me is working fine , i have some troble tuneup, first i disable most of the whisles and shine things so it reduce the ram it loads now only use at starts 900 mgs , wxp/64 600 mgs.

I downloaded al the new drivers from invidia, and i rize the virtual memory, i test it w7 vs w64 with the same file in the same computer and max 2011 render 15 faster.

 

I post my result somewhere here in the forum

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