pouët.net

whoa, release candidate already? The first beta was out not long ago. That's.. a bit worryingly fast.

Jcl: it's not a case of "512mb video card = 512mb lost".. i'm not sure how it works out exactly, but i have a 256mb card and 4gb, and I get 3.3gb in windows. I don't have anything else that would eat 512mb, so it must be either using 2x the video ram + bios + whatever, or just reserving a standard sized block.

psionice: i think it's rather good that they have RC already. keep in mind that officially released beta build 7000 was ready in december already. and quality-wise, it's actually RC-alike. so if they want to release RC now, it's nothing to be worried about - it's actually good move imho, if they wanna have it RTM in this year. because that means they wanna spend next 6 months on hunting bugs and fixing those. sounds good to me.

eek, where did that 'i' came from.. :P

graga: why do you want 32bit-mode?

unicorn: it's a very short beta period for an OS. It either means they're happy with it as it is, and have had few bug reports, or they're rushing a release.

Considering the way vista has gone down, I guess they're right to go for a pretty fast release for win7, but if it's got some nasty bugs that rear their heads around launch time, they'll have vista 2. Then again, it pretty much is vista 2, so I guess with a lot of the code being the same there's perhaps a lot less to test than last time so it could work out well.

Don't worry about the i, about 50% of people on here add it and never notice ;) Besides, I've been spelling your name with an M at the same.. RN and M look identical with that font + size :/

psonice: ;)

you're right that they probably have much less work to do with testing. besides, if many people are happy with current beta and consider it much better than vista and actually better than xp.. i guess it's ready for RC.
besides, imho beta means 'most of the features ready, some last-minute things can be added later', and RC means 'no more features, only bugfixes'. so turning it into RC doesn't mean that they wanna throw bugtesting out of the window, i think it rather means they don't wanna add any more features, because they're happy with it the way it is, and they wanna focus on hunting bugs.

moose: I think I wasn't making a concious choice when I wrote that - I just defaulted to what I already knew was stable. Also, 32-bit was what I could find on TPB by looking at the top-100 Windows programs.

However, of course I will be running 64-bit win7 on my demobox when it is available.

windows 7 = vista rc3.

Fool me once/twice?

Microsoft rushing Win7 can't have anything to do with the current crisis and that they desperatly need some fresh cashflow into their company can it?

if they would be rushing it, well.. they would be able to have it RTM in may, or maybe even april. bugs would be fixed in SP1 then. and still, it would be far better than vista is currently, simply because it already is. but since they wanna release it around autumn.. no, i wouldn't call it rushing.

gloom:

There are 2 machines in this history, and all of the flaws in both were present within the first year of ownership. This doesnt even mention the _multiple_ battery recalls.
Half of those faults (broken usb, knife-sharp edges, busted mouse) were with the new machine. After paying a high premium for YET ANOTHER disappointing peice of crap she doesnt want a peice of crap anymore. Especially not one with $180 service packs that count new desktop background images as features. :P

gbnd: you might want to take a look at page 4 of this (the satisfaction ratings): http://www.changewave.com/assets/alliance/reports/consumer_spending_20090218press/pc_20090218pr.pdf

Ignoring apple, it's probably a good indication of your chances of getting a decent machine. Asus + acer seem good. Sony most likely made those batteries you got replaced (although that would have been the case for a lot of the makes on there).

Seems IBM's kit has gone downhill very fast since it got sold to the chinese, no surprise there :)

You probably have an activated (in BIOS) integrated graphic card on board, and/or other memory mapped devices... but yes, it all depends on how your mobo/BIOS tries to map those devices into the 32-bit memory addressing pool (that, and some CPU features), so it's not a standard and mileages may vary from setup to setup for no apparent reason (although there *is* one :) )

graga: the nice thing about 64bit OSes is that you can run 32bit programs, and still utilize all your memory. It's the best of the two worlds :)

Afaik the max you get with 32bit Windows is 3.3GB. I have a 1GB graphics card and have ~3GB of my 4GB physical RAM available. Something like: available RAM = (4GB - max(0.7, memory for memory-mapped devices))

rare: In my last box, I got 3.5gb on XP MediaCenter and Vista 32 (with a 512mb ATI card)... I've seen others get up to 3.7gb available. Many only get 3.3gb, and others get only 3gb... it really depends on many factors (some of which may look random to you, or me).

This current box has never had a 32bit OS so I wouldn't know.

Jcl: Yeah, it's not an exact science that 32bit addressing-thing. My "old" machine had 4 GB of physical memory, but only 3.3 GB shows up as usable in the OS.

gloom: it depends at least on the chipset you have, afaik.

I have 4 GB here, and I can use 3.5 of them on 32-bit XP.

k then. :) How it works seems to be pretty much a mystery though ;)

It's not really a mystery I guess. Windows XP (32 bit) can only address up to 4 GB RAM in total, meaning that if you have 1 GB RAM on your GFX-card, Windows can only use 3 GB of the system memory, even though you may have more. My XP machine has 750 MB of memory on the graphics card, so therefore I get 3.3 GB RAM in Windows. Wow, that was simpler than I thought. :)

so you are basically saying windows7 is like the songsmith of operating systems?

gloom: "some" chipsets/cpu combinations allow the full use of those 4Gb (since XP kernel is PAE-enabled by default) doing nasty tricks on the device memory mapping (transparent to the OS)... but it's really rare. I've seen some HP workstations do this (and show 4gb as available, even with a 512mb graphics card).

Those "probably" (this is a wild guess), have certain amount of RAM on the chipset itself (and a tweaked BIOS) for device memory mapping and use weird mapping tricks when the OS/drivers try to access those mapped addresses (via mapping tables or something, kind of what PAE does in the processor)... again, this is a wild guess, but that's the only logic I can find around that.

I have a 256mb card, no 'integrated' card or other such shit, and nothing enabled in the bios (it's a mac, so there isn't a bios to set stuff in). So in theory, there's 256mb + bios etc, nothing more.. 3.3gb available. I think it's probably a limit from the chipset or something.