[Mak213]

Originally Posted by darsunt

I settled for vista business 64. 7 is still in testing stage, and I'd rather not fool with that. Also I'm putting in 4G of memory.

Does anyone know how big a partition you are supposed to reserve for the 7 operating system? I believe one should reserve 40G harddrive for vista, I'm hoping 7 is substantially smaller.

Sorry but no. Win7 is still built off of Vista so it will still require a big amount of hard drive space. At least 16GB just for the install and bare minimal programs installed.

Here's what you need to have:

Internet access (to download Windows 7 RC and get updates)

A PC with these system requirements:

1 GHz or faster 32-bit (x86) or 64-bit (x64) processor

1 GB RAM (32-bit) / 2 GB RAM (64-bit)

16 GB available disk space (32-bit) / 20 GB (64-bit)

DirectX 9 graphics processor with WDDM 1.0 or higher driver

Right from the Windows site.

[Jayce]

If I were running a home computer, I think I'd consider Vista or wait for 7 overtop of XP. However, contrary to other opinions here, I wouldn't dream of running Vista on any less than a dual core with 2 gig of RAM. I run Vista on a quad core with 4 gig of RAM at home and it flies. But I ran it on a dual core with a gig of RAM. It ran pretty good... until I opened a program. Then it seemed to tank on me.

However, if I were running a business or I was a director of technology at a school district, I would absolutely not consider Vista... We have 2,000 computers. 3 of them are Vista. Those 3 have caused enough headaches to just avoid that direction.

We are, however, looking forward to Windows 7 and plan to upgrade the entire district around this time next year.

Originally Posted by carnageX

That depends on what you are doing with the OS. Large apps (i.e. games), yes you'll need more space. Basic stuff? Not necessarily... Plus if you turn off the resources that eat up space (system restore, hibernation, shadow copies) then more space is significantly taken down for the requirement. I believe the minimum requirement for both 7 and Vista are 20GB.

I run Vista on an 80gb partition. I have several games installed (CS, CS Source, L4D, UO, and several others), along with your basic apps like firefox, office 07, etc. I believe I'm using in the market of 50-55gb of space.

[darsunt]

I have a duo core and 4G, so I hope the 4G will be adequate for my records and software work. I hope 64 bit will help too.

I still wish microsoft offered an option of small and efficient. The only reason I'm not going with XP pro is like the others here mentioned, it is easily hacked and the newer versions of microsoft programs might not work on it, and I definitely want to get stuff like microsoft's latest asp.net and maybe even visual studio. Also I have vista business on a duo core 2G, and it looks okay, although we only use that computer for internet.

I'm intrigued that 7 is getting good press and yet is still such a massive operating system. I'm not surprised that vista being such a huge piece of code had so many teething difficulties. I'm happy 7 seems to be fast and efficient now, but I'm amazed they did it when the code is still so huge, and based on the original beast.

So far I'm planning to make a 40G partition for the op system on a 250G disk. I found that has been mentioned many times as a good standard vista partition on the internet, but who knows?

[patonb]

If you go searching, XP had same complaints back in the day.. I had 98se on a 2Gig partion ith room to spare, than XP need like 3 times more..

I stand by my thoughts that vistas main issue was MS push as an upgrade, which flopped.

I think youre safer with 60Gig, Mak has a better idea as he's a beta teste.

[darsunt]

I might push the size of the partition a bit.

As for my wish list, I don't mean xp is the perfect op system, but I wished MS would have an alternative op system that would compete with linux for smaller size and efficiency. But I guess the relationship between customer and vender is a compromise, and you can't get everything you want.

I am not an expert with vista, if I had been using it more I might have a more educated opinion. But I know what it is like to work on huge software projects. You are always dealing with problems left by previous programmers from years back (short cuts, bugs not fixed) and no one really has a good grasp of the big picture. Problems with huge software projects are legendary, and academia has been trying to find solutions to those problems for years, with only modest success.

So I tend to be prejudiced towards believing the earlier complaints about vista had a kernel of truth to them. But I don't know for sure. And if 7 really is as great as they say, then I admire MS for pulling off a minor miracle.

[patonb]

Couldn't you get one of the stripped out versins of vista, pople have avaliable?

Think Mak had said, bare minumial you can get vista to 16Gig.

[darsunt]

I did not look into stripped out versions of vista. I did not know they existed.

I am happy enough about how things turned out. Ideally I would have wanted a smaller op system but right now I don't have the time for linux, and we all have to make compromises.