Windows 7

[stickler]

Amusing how everyone "bags" Vista because everone else does! This has been going on for three years and yes, it had a few nvidia video driver issues initially.

I have had Vista from the day it was released and it has worked flawlessly. I now have a dual boot with Win 7 and while Win 7 is no doubt better, it is not significantly different to Vista and in my opinion, not worth the upgrade price unless you have specific issues to address.

I will be waiting for Win 8 before I pay for it.

[Richary]

My Windows requirements may be slightly out of the normal home user range because we have management software for specific radio gear, and not all was compatible with Vista - even trying to run in compatibility modes and admin access. Windows 7 handles those much better though not always perfectly when it comes to display etc.

I also had issues with Vista in that if I got an address through DHCP then had to go onsite and manually set an IP address to talk to something it would keep the old gateway address from the DHCP. To recover required a reboot or at least disabling then re-enabling the ethernet adaptor. Tedious to say the least. Win 7 has solved that one at least.

For those who have upgraded from Vista to 7, it still ran like a dog having just done the upgrade path. Backing the laptop up, reformatting and starting from scratch it runs much better though very annoying having to reinstall all the software again.

But if you have XP, I would stick with it as I will be on the home machine. If you have Vista, take the PC back to the supplier and ask for a refund as it is not fot for purpose under trade practices laws

[bshwckr]

Amusing how everyone "bags" Vista because everone else does! This has been going on for three years and yes, it had a few nvidia video driver issues initially.

I have had Vista from the day it was released and it has worked flawlessly. I now have a dual boot with Win 7 and while Win 7 is no doubt better, it is not significantly different to Vista and in my opinion, not worth the upgrade price unless you have specific issues to address.

I will be waiting for Win 8 before I pay for it.

I agree. I dual boot Vista and Win7 and the differences are minor. I never really had any Vista problems on my PC. I am now running with the legit full version of Win7 on my PC because work gave it to me but if it was not free, I would not bother.
I removed Win 7 off my netbook and went back to XP. XP definately runs faster and smoother on the netbook.

[cdmark]

Amusing how everyone "bags" Vista because everone else does! This has been going on for three years and yes, it had a few nvidia video driver issues initially.

I have had Vista from the day it was released and it has worked flawlessly. I now have a dual boot with Win 7 and while Win 7 is no doubt better, it is not significantly different to Vista and in my opinion, not worth the upgrade price unless you have specific issues to address.

I will be waiting for Win 8 before I pay for it.

I can't bag Vista as fortunately I have never had to use it. I do bag the idea of having to pay a varied and ridiculous amount of money for something that really should come as an upgrade or service pack though. I would be peeved if I paid for Vista a few years ago and now have to choose if Windows 7 is worth the extra dollars.

[Damo.]

I do bag the idea of having to pay a varied and ridiculous amount of money for something that really should come as an upgrade or service pack though. I would be peeved if I paid for Vista a few years ago and now have to choose if Windows 7 is worth the extra dollars.

Well now you are talking about Mac OS again.
At least Microsoft do provide service packs free of charge.

[cdmark]

I do bag the idea of having to pay a varied and ridiculous amount of money for something that really should come as an upgrade or service pack though. I would be peeved if I paid for Vista a few years ago and now have to choose if Windows 7 is worth the extra dollars.

Well now you are talking about Mac OS again.
At least Microsoft do provide service packs free of charge.

But isn't Windows 7 just a service pack for Vista with fancy packaging?

[setsujoku]

One thing that MS haven't advertised much, and hence a lot of people don't know about is that you can download and run what they are calling XP compatability mode. More simply it is a free download of a XP SP3 virtual machine that you can run on your system to overcome issues of software that needs to run in XP and will not run in 7 or Vista.

It's only available if you have Pro, Enterprise, or Ultimate versions of Windows 7, and is only available in the 32bit version (you can still run this on a Win7 64 bit system though). It doesn't require any registration or purchasing of of WinXP.

Check out the features here.
Basically you can pass through any USB devices, printers, and copy and paste funtions to the virtual machine, and you can publish apps from XP to Win7 so that when you start the app up it runs the virtual machine in the background and you just see the app running.

Only thing I would say is that if you have a lower spec'd PC/Laptop then you might not get too much performance from running XP mode on top of Win7, but it's there and available none the less. If you aren't sure if your system is up to spec, then run this tool before starting the download.

The download is ~600 meg, so not a light download, but if you have a decent connection it shouldn't take long. Note that the only way to get this is via the web, it's not on the install DVD or anything like that. There are 2 files that you have to download in order to get up and running, you can grab them here

[Richary]

Unfortunately XP compatibility mode didn't work that well with a lot of our software under Vista. It is somewhat better under Win7 but still not perfect. I still have a few programs (specialised, designed to manage certain radios) where the display stuffs up = though at least they are usable now when they weren't under Vista.

[Map Monkey]

I also had issues with Vista in that if I got an address through DHCP then had to go onsite and manually set an IP address to talk to something it would keep the old gateway address from the DHCP. To recover required a reboot or at least disabling then re-enabling the ethernet adaptor. Tedious to say the least. Win 7 has solved that one at least.

Great, it wasn't just me with that same problem.

mm

[Jezzza_Xtreme]

Unfortunately XP compatibility mode didn't work that well with a lot of our software under Vista. It is somewhat better under Win7 but still not perfect. I still have a few programs (specialised, designed to manage certain radios) where the display stuffs up = though at least they are usable now when they weren't under Vista.

I'm not sure XP mode is the same as Compatibility mode. From what I understand you run a seperate XP OS in a virtual machine, so programs you run within that are essentially executed in XP. It's like using VMWare, but especially tailored to include device and window integration.

[setsujoku]

Unfortunately XP compatibility mode didn't work that well with a lot of our software under Vista. It is somewhat better under Win7 but still not perfect. I still have a few programs (specialised, designed to manage certain radios) where the display stuffs up = though at least they are usable now when they weren't under Vista.

I'm not sure XP mode is the same as Compatibility mode. From what I understand you run a seperate XP OS in a virtual machine, so programs you run within that are essentially executed in XP. It's like using VMWare, but especially tailored to include device and window integration.

Short answer is yes that is correct.

[ruzzelz]

Windows 7 seemed fine - until today when I tried and tried and tried with installing mapsource & City Nav and other Garmin products.

There goes one day of caching but things seem OK.

Now to progress through
- Track 4 Australia - OK
-Still working progressively with a few other issues

[ruzzelz]

Has anyone got Contours Austraila working on Windows 7 - It seems to causing my problems with Mapsouce.

Mapsouce went down again once I tried installing Contours Australia. Fortunately this time Mapsouce seems OK once I uninstalled Contours Australia.

[setsujoku]

Has anyone got Contours Austraila working on Windows 7 - It seems to causing my problems with Mapsouce.

Mapsouce went down again once I tried installing Contours Australia. Fortunately this time Mapsouce seems OK once I uninstalled Contours Australia.

I've got mapsource running on my 64bit install of Win7 without any issues. Haven't come across any stability issues on any of my programs yet.
When it crashes what shows up in the event log? I'm assuming that you are running the latest version of mapsource?

[ruzzelz]

In the end I had to get the latest version of Mapsource downloaded & installed and then build up from there from my CD versions
- Trip& WP Manager V4
-City Nav V 4.00 Set Up CD
-City Nav V6
-City NaUpdate 2008

From there Tracks 4 Australia was loaded and things were still fine.

I then tried to load Contours 5m and the whole thing went down again. Fortunately removing Contours solved the problems except having to get drivers for my Map 60CSx.

I have since installed Shonky Maps and things are working fine still fine.