Dream Machine

[MSC290]

Windows 7 and IE 8 Betas

Running slightly over a week on the following system:
AMD Athlon Dual Core 4200 (32 bit) with 3 GB RAM - Graphics chip on motherboard ATI Radeon x1200

First install was on a 10 year old 20 GB IDE hard drive as a clean install (It runs fast on this old IDE hard drive). Second install as a dual boot on a SATA drive with an existing XP Pro system. Minimum install hard drive space for Windows 7 is listed as 16 GB but both installs used between10-11 GB.

Usually only test on weekends with various Linux systems but decided to give this OS a try. Had not tested Vista after reading about the multitude of problems. Have been very happy with XP Pro and the Firefox browser combination.

Expected Windows 7 to be a problem but was so impressed with the install, smooth operation, and speed of it along with IE 8 after a few hours of testing that it has been given full load tests for over a week. Running with both IE 8 and Firefox open at the same time with multiple tabs open in each along with spreadsheets, word processing documents, streaming RSS news reader, and eTrade Pro with streaming quotes.

Found three web sites that did not render properly using the IE 8 Beta browser (iHub, eTrade, AOL mail) but the fix is easy. There is an icon on the right side of the address bar at the top of the screen (aside of the refresh icon) labeled Compatability View which when clicked displays the page properly. The Compatability View button is described as a fix for websites designed for older browsers to correct problems such as out-of-place menus, images, or text.

Windows 7 and IE 8 are very fast and smooth on this system. Also found the learning curve from XP Pro to Windows 7 to be no problem. So far the performance and use are better than XP Pro. Functions are easy to find and change if necessary. Will continue to run this as the primary operating stystem until the trial expires in August 2009.

Here are the listed minimum requirements:
• 1 GHz 32-bit or 64-bit processor
• 1 GB of system memory
• 16 GB of available disk space
• Support for DirectX 9 graphics with 128 MB memory (to enable the Aero theme)
• DVD-R/W Drive (actually not necessary)

Link - How to Get, Install, and Play With Windows 7 Pain Free:
#msg-34776064