i’ve got and like XP on both laptop and desktop, and could upgrade to 7 Pro for £30.

is it worth it for that price, what untold wonders will I be obtaining for myself?

If your XP is fine then I wouldn’t change for now but W7 is certainly nice to use and seems very robust – using it both at home and work now. If I could get it for £30 I’d upgrade the media PC I also have at home which is XP. Where’s your offer from?

on W7 now from Vista and it’s an improvement. Seems stable although I do have a few issues woth it being slow to come out of ‘sleep’

that’s a bargain price, kinda depends on your pc/laptop spec IMO, though Win7 isn’t as resource hungary as vista by all accounts.
Every new MS operating system will eventually become a huge pile of security patches that slows anything but a brand new pc down…

If reasonably new kit, then yes.

I run XP on my PC, W7 on the laptop…

I still prefer XP….or is it a desktop I prefer….

30 quid not bad, depends on the spec of the computer….

as mentioned, depends on the spec of the computer. If you’ve got 2Gb+ of RAM, I’d pay the £30 and get Win7 on there.

yeah cheers all – only got 1gb RAM on laptop, so was figuring might not be enough for 7, but got 2gb on desktop so may get if for that.

i’m doing law studies so get microsoft student discount, got office 2010 pro for £40, not bad!

Even 2GB might be a bit short

Sat here with just outlook ’10, firefox and a few background programs running I’m using 1.85GB

interesting… maybe it’s a stretch too far!

I got Office 10 for £8.95 – legitimately 🙂 So there.

I’d still like your W7 offer though!

blimey, that’s even better value!

You should be fine with 1Gb of RAM. Windows 7 aggressively uses as much memory as you have available, so looking at the “memory in use” of machines with more RAM than yours is not a valid basis for saying “Win 7 needs X Gb of RAM”.

oh that’s interesting, thanks for that – i’d seen the minimum listed as 1gb, but don’t particularly want to upgrade if it’s barely struggling to cope.

reckon will definitely go for it for the desktop as for that price seems silly not to.

some microsoft stuff lets you use the same serial key for more than one computer, i take it that’s not the case with the OS? 😀

Depends on the license – you can get OEM, 1 computer, 3 computer and various other licenses.

Didn’t know that SamB, useful to know thanks

Yeah it does seem a bit odd at first – my PC with 4GB of memory has 3.5GB “in use” most of the time!

These articles explain it in a bit more depth if you’re interested:
ARS (blunter): http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/news/2010/02/behind-the-windows-7-memory-usage-scaremongering.ars
ZDNet (more words): http://www.zdnet.com/blog/bott/windows-7-memory-usage-whats-the-best-way-to-measure/1786

slight hijack but does windows 7 limit the amount one program can use processors?

I’ve just moved to this laptop from a Vista machine (single core) and when rendering some mp3 files yesterday i noticed processor usage (across all four cores) never got above 20%.

Can i boost the usage, I’d rather the files got done quicker at the loss of other processes, when rendering on macs all four cores zoom up to 100% and sit there.

Interestingly enough audacity used all four cores equally whereas wavelab (a more professional tool) used 2 processors a lot more. I won’t pretend to understand kernels etc so i might be talking gibberish

Check that your older hardware is supported. I tried it on my 5 year old Winxp laptop (luckily using a spare HDD) and it couldn’t get drivers for the integrated soundcard and network card, so i swapped the drives back and returned to XP.

mrmichaelwright – Member

slight hijack but does windows 7 limit the amount one program can use processors?

I’ve just moved to this laptop from a Vista machine (single core) and when rendering some mp3 files yesterday i noticed processor usage (across all four cores) never got above 20%.

Can i boost the usage, I’d rather the files got done quicker at the loss of other processes, when rendering on macs all four cores zoom up to 100% and sit there.

Interestingly enough audacity used all four cores equally whereas wavelab (a more professional tool) used 2 processors a lot more. I won’t pretend to understand kernels etc so i might be talking gibberish

Not limited in that way, the encoder could be though (e.g. LAME will only ever use one core).

in order for a program to use multiple cores, it has to be multithreaded, which is a choice made by the programmer…

Doesnt W7 also have the ability to use any flash drive thats plugged in as RAM?

I would say its worth the upgrade from XP. there are a lot of little things that all add up to make it better to use. Plus the XP mode in it ensures everything you need to work or are used to using will work.

I like it.

What you need is the Windows 7 Upgrade Advisor. It’ll tell you if there’s likely to be any problems before you spend money.

Memory’s cheap, stop mincing about and get a couple of gig thrown in your laptop.

Doesnt W7 also have the ability to use any flash drive thats plugged in as RAM?

Not any drive, it’s got to be fast enough. And it’s not ‘RAM’ exactly, calling it a disk cache would be more accurate (but oversimplified). Google ‘readyboost’.

Oh, and,

I like Windows 7. Weapon of choice these days. Going back to XP is painful.

W7 is about 50000 times better than XP.

in order for a program to use multiple cores, it has to be multithreaded, which is a choice made by the A programmer…

Fixed that.

By that I mean you can write single threaded apps and some other part of the system may be able to spread it across multiple cores.

readyboost worked well on vista on my old machine with a 2GB SD card

I was expecting it to work on W7 with my 16GB PCcard but it don’t

Readyboost works when you have little ram, and has less of an effect as you increase.

I use it on Mrs Grips Vaio P series which has 2Gb ram that is not upgradeable.

a little research has indicated that steinberg (makers of wavelab) are pretty poor at multithread implementation, it’s possibly using one core per audio channel (so two for stereo) which is at least better than audacity.

Readyboost works when you have little ram, and has less of an effect as you increase.

I suspect that might be more a case of “Readyboost works when you have insufficient RAM, and doesn’t do anything when you have a surplus.” The solution, where practically possible, is “add more RAM.” (Ie, it’s ideal in situations where the memory isn’t upgradeable.)

(so, basically, what you said. Not arguing, point I’m trying to get at is that it’s not usually the best solution).

Can you ever have a surplus of RAM? 🙂

The benchmarks I read suggested that it made no difference over 4Gb. Which makes sense, because all it’s doing is using the SD card or whatever for swap, same as the HD but faster. Less swap activity = less performance gain.

‘s about the size of it. And, good point well made.

I went for a fresh install from Vista to W7 and it’s a huge improvement. It’s a Dell Inspiron 1520 with 1gb of ram and runs smoothly and quick.

By that I mean you can write single threaded apps and some other part of the system may be able to spread it across multiple cores

but only one at a time 🙂

Where can you get this deal? I’d like to upgrade my XP computer to W7 for £30.

hey jules – it’s a student deal only, i’m converting to law so qualify for the discount.

If you have kids in school (any age…mine son was 4 when I bought from them), software4students is excellent…

Home

All genuine and I found the site following a link from the Microsoft website.

Couple of years ago, I bought a full licensed version of Office 2007 Enterprise for £35!