Cheers JJ. I guess you're right about the onboard sound thing. What confused me is that my motherboard is an old nforce 2 model. I suppose Windows went with the Realtek option due to a lack of old nforce drivers being available. I will try what you suggest and see if that works, however it isn't a big problem as disabling the Realtek drivers has achieved the desired effect.

The GPU issue has been resolved (as I tried to articulate in the last post). The problem was a fairly simple one. AMD in their infinite wisdom have stopped supporting their older DX9 cards. Using the older drivers seems to have done the trick. I've installed HL2 (and all its bells and whistles), and it is now running fine. Haven't tried any HD video though. I do have some 720p files on a DVD somewhere, that I will dig out. To be honest they only just played smoothly on XP (as long as there was nothing else running that demanded significant processor attention).

So they've managed to strip stuff out and make it slower?! That's impressive.

I downloaded it, just creating an image of the machine that is going to be the guinea pig.

Clicky

More benchmarks on Bit-tech. W7 is slower than Vista in most cases....which makes the hype even more baffling.

Exactly. I think the Vista-haters have backed the wrong horse here. But don't forget, it's "SO MUCH BETTER THAN VISTA!!!"

I reckon as soon as the drivers for Win 7 are properly released, I think it'll be just as fast, if not faster. Give it time. Although, if you want the fastest FPS, go to XP. Silly people. There's nothing wrong with Vista, nothing wrong with Win 7 (from what I've found), granted I'm running the likes of CS 1.6, COD (original) and Unreal GOTY, so not really taxing, but it's absolutely fine. I think I'll be jumping ship to 7 a few days after release I reckon.

Well, the Nvidia drivers have gone WHQL, and I've just bought a new hard drive, so I'm going to get onto some benchmarking over the weekend. Personally I think it'll fail badly.

I installed the RC today, and it seems to be running fine on my system. Can't tell any difference between this and the 7000 build, but it seems to be stable enough.

I'll get round to posting my PC spec's at some stage but now it's time to put the littlun to bed, so night all!

It point-blank refused to install on all but one of my 4 hard drives, typically the oldest and slowest one. Doh!

Still, CPC benchmarks were nothing to write home about. The same as my Vista score. I was going to run the crysis benchmark, but got bored and went back to Vista for another bash of Clear Sky.

I agree - you can't expect pre-release software to perform as well as the real thing, that's why it's pre-release. Anyway, I shall be installing the RC soon but as it seems that after the beta, it's nothing to write home about, I'm not exactly in a rush.

Well I was really excited about it until I read the performance reviews and saw the benchmarks. I was hoping for something a bit nippier than Vista... But as it only seems to be boot times that are noticeably better (and I don't shut down my PC, I "sleep" it) I reckon it's not worth getting right now.

When drivers come out, that's another story. I'll be excited again!

After hand-ins I think I might experiment with it. I've been steering clear of it just incase something happens to my beloved PC and I suddenly can't do my work. A new HDD might be in order even then =)

Like I've said before, it's awesome, really is, when Vista first came out, I was really dubious about it, but Win7 just seems alot better. The way it groups windows is really slick and the fact you can close them easily from there is also a bonus. And I thought I would miss the side bar, which I've got on my Vista (main) rig. But I don't, I just adds clutter. One thing I have found a problem is the networking. When I had XP on my laptop, I had it so I could access every folder on the HDD, but when I installed Win7, I couldn't for the life of me set it up. Got RedFlames to give me a hand, lol.

After that, it's just really easy to use. And seeing as Win7 RC is labbled 'Ultimate', based on what I've seen from the RC, I think I may be buying Ultimate when it's released in October.

After running the Beta for a while, I've now switched all my systems (Tablet, HTPC and Desktop) to Win7.
Although its not startlingly "better" than Vista it IS "different" and I like the revisions. Many things are much improved: it seems very good at finding and loading new drivers which "just work", though my hardware is hardly unusual, so that's not a great test! The UI is cleaner and benchmarks aside has been re-vamped to "feel" faster. There are volumes of stuff about this which indicate that perceived speed is down to lots of subtle factors which aren't obvious from simplistic benchmarks. MS have obviously read some of this.

There are gripes: my HTPC runs a Gigabyte board (780G chipset) with a Realtek HD sound chip\codec. The RC version using latest ATI (9.4) drivers has horribly distorted sound through the "digital"( SPDIF and\or USB) output, downgrading to earlier chipset\GPU drivers partially solves this, but I'm not happy!!! This problem is new since Beta 7057, and Vista works fine....

Overall I'd give MS at least 7/10 and by the time its released maybe more....

I installed it earlier today. First impressions - not bad. Not too much seems to have changed since build 7000 but still, it seems good.

I had Vista Ultimate 64bit installed before and was quite happy with it.
Now I have installed win 7RC 64bit. I know nothing of benchmarks ,or care but to me win 7 is a lot faster than Vista in booting and opening stuff.
Also it automatically installed the latest video drivers without me having to visit nvidia site to get them. This it did on both my desktop and laptop.

So far if win 7rc keeps performing this well I will be buying the retail version when it arrives.