Windows 7 and HTPC

[McBainUK]

With Windows 7 a month away what are the pros and cons of it as a platform for GB-PVR and HTPC in general?

[hoborg]

none at all

[Graham]

I have read quite a bit of stuff and found nothing to convince me that it's worth money. It seems to have three things going for it ...

It's prettier than Vista in the same way that Vista is prettier than XP.

It's not as slow as Vista - It's about the same speed as XP

It has better built in video decoders than XP and Vista.

The last of these is a benefit, but only if you think that you can resist the temptation to try every other decoder that you can find.

My GBPVR machine runs XP and I don't plan to change.

My daughters laptop runs really slowly so I might offer to go halves with her on Win7.

[Fatman_do]

So far, for me, my biggest problem with windows 7 is that my DVI-HDMI video out to the TV does not work in windows 7, but does in XP. I suspect it is a drivers issue, but I am up to date with those and still no luck.

It appears that others on the interwebs have the same issue, so I don't know if I will take the plunge and purchase it, or revert back to XP.

[BigMoose]

Given the pvr box just runs gbpvr I couldn't care less how much "prettier" the OS is, but if it runs quicker than Vista (I currently use Vista64 ultimate) then I wonder if it's worth giving a go. That said, any performance problems I've had have not been CPU related and the recent graphics hardware upgrade has made everything run silky smooth, so I guess I have nothing to gain except a load of configuation hassle and annoyed wife and kids by doing an upgrade!

[hoborg]

Just to now:
I finaly got my SSD replace.
Instaled Win7 x64 RTM - takes ~10 minutes (working machine, dual boot).
Win7 boot and start downloading 2 updates, first one was Audigy driver and second unknow, becouse it ends in BSOD. Really nice wellcome Win7 ...

[tuckster]

We've had Windows 7 on our laptop for the past few months. For the most part I have really liked it. It's as fast or faster than XP and has all of the nice features of Vista. We have a nagging wireless card driver issue (Dell Inspiron 6400) that I can't get resolved. Sometimes the card works, sometimes it doesn't. Could be a hardware problem, but we never had problems before 7.

As far as HTPC goes - unless you're changing from GBPVR to MCE I wouldn't see any advantages. Networking might be a little simpler & easier than XP, but not worth the price of admission in my opinion.

[Bathman]

Win 7 has teh EVR renderer built in which in my opinion gives the best picture quality. It is also quicker than Vista and has less bells and whistle. It is in no way faster than XP.

Also at present I am having the odd issue which I suspect are driver related. I couldn't get scaling correct with the latest ATI driver - was ok with an older release and I an also having sound over the HDMI problems both of which I suspect are ATI driver related.

My Point of View Atom 330 client box running Win 7 64 has however been trouble free.

[martint123]

I'm currently running tinyXP - but if I am forced into Win7 for any reason is there a ready-use list of things to do to make it more usable. I've not run or seen Vista, never mind pre releases of w7 - but have read of things like UAC that can get in the way of editing/updating files and ending up with multiple copies of them.

The sorts of things like I do to an XP install before discovering nlite and/or tinyXP - disabling file indexing, animated windows, restore points, use old '98 style explorer, move instaldir to separate partition, likewise my documents - etc etc....

I'd like to be prepared if I have to make the jump.

[johnsonx42]

I just upgraded my HTPC from XP SP3 to Win7 RC. For me, it has been a MAJOR improvement. I could never get acceptable video playback, with any combination of decoders and drivers (various combinations of tearing, stuttering, poor de-interlacing, etc.). Now playback is perfect, just perfect (I'm using the Microsoft DTV-DVD Decoder, but it just as good with ATI Mpeg-2 from AVIVO). It also seems quite a bit faster in many instances, like PVRX2 launches much more quickly (no doubt that's superfetch doing it's thing); of course once I'm done messing with it launching PVRX2 won't be a regular thing.

As to UAC, I've completely given up on the notion of running GB-PVR on any system with UAC enabled. Until the data & config files get moved away from Program Files, there are just too many gotcha's with UAC on.

One minor thing I ran into related to GB-PVR and Win7 is that the 'Allow Service to Interact with Desktop' needs to be enabled or the web server won't load. The only reports of this I see before now were PCH/NMT specific, but I don't have either and still needed to set this; sub may need to make that the default from now on.