Operating Systems are simply one of those things in modern life that you cannot do without, unless of course you are one of the few people on the planet that never uses a computer (in which case you won’t be reading this anyway!).
Over the years, I have used pretty much every OS for P.C that has has been released, right from the “good old” days of MS-DOS, though Windows 95/98, Windows ME/2000,Windows XP and even Linux on rare occaision, but the one I always seem to return to (unsurprisingly) is Windows XP.
Recently, as kind of an experiment and maybe because I was a bit bored on that given day, I decided to give Windows 7 a whirl to see what all the fuss was about and after hearing how wonderful it was from several friends and colleagues.
Initially, I was quite impressed with the shiny new Microsoft offering, although I wasn’t that impressed with the minimum install size, coming in at a whopping 15 gigabytes. I know that 15gb is small in today’s 21st century of cheap hard dives with hundreds of gigabytes of storage, but I still think this is a bit of cheek for an OS. The install went very smoothly and after several hours, I was up and running with my new shiny install of Windows 7. If you are a bit of a Windows XP die-hard like me (there are many of us), then initially you may find the Windows 7 interface a bit bewildering as there are quite a few different things. I will not be going into any detail about features here as this is not meant to be a review, but Windows 7 is different and you will probably like it once you get used to the differences from Windows XP.
Now onto the problems that I faced. Admittedly there were not a huge amount of problems, but the ones that I had were enough (for me personally) to give up and go back to Windows XP. For starters, Windows 7 really did not want to play very nicely with both my soundcard and my joystick. I have an old Soundblaster Live Value and an old Microsoft Sidewinder Force-Feedback joystick, both of which worked perfectly well under Windows XP, but were not very happy with this new fangled Windows. There are no “proper” Windows 7 available drivers for the SB Live, but I managed to “sort of” get the soundcard to function with the old Win XP drivers. The only problem was that I could not access Audio HQ at all which meant that the reverb effect was permanently on (annoying for both videos and some games) and the bass and treble settings were set to their lowest value and permanently greyed out, so essentially the sound coming out of my speakers was pretty crap. I also could not get the Creative gameport on the card to initially work until after some faffing around and searching online for a solution. However, I then discovered that Windows 7 just would not detect my MS Sidewinder FF joystick and this took lots more searching and faffing about to get working. I play a lot of flight-sims and I still love my old Sidewinder (it still works perfectly) so I was not too pleased with this.
The final problem with the soundcard came when I tried to get midi working with the gameport under Windows 7. I’m a musician and I use Cubase, but I use one of the old style gameport midi interfaces and again this took a lot of faffing about (and some swearing) to get working correctly. I’m sure some of you out there are probably thinking “why don’t you just get a USB midi interface and a USB joystick?”. Well, it’s true I could do that, but I’m of the opnion that if you have something that you still like to use and it still works perfectly well, then why should you have to upgrade or change it? I know this doesn’t always apply to computer stuff, but I think there are limits and I’m of the opnion that some things should “just bloody work!”
The next problem and probably the final insult came when I tried to play some of the games that I own. I play a LOT of P.C games and quite often I like to revisit older titles in my collection. Now, on the whole, Windows 7 runs the majority of games quite nicely, even older titles and certainly much better than Windows Vista did. However, when you get to older games that use copy protection systems such as Starforce, then the game just often crashes or simply doesn’t run at all. As a couple of examples, I encountered problems with both Rush For Berlin Gold and Hammer & Sickle. With both games, when they said they were installing the Starforce protection drivers and had to reboot the system, I rebooted and tried running the game, but then got the same message again. I did a bit of research online and there was allegedly a way of getting the Starforce drivers to upgrade to the latest version (that should be compatible with Windows 7), but I just could not get this to happen. In the end I was forced to use no CD/DVD hacks just to get the games to run (not good). To be fair, this particular problem is not really Microsoft’s fault, but it was still a deciding factor for me in going back to Windows XP.
Conclusion
In general, Windows 7 is a very good operating system and is certainly a huge improvement over Windows Vista. If you don’t play games at all or even if you are new to P.C gaming and maybe only play the very latest, cutting edge releases, then I can certainly recommend it. The OS is nice to use, is very stable and has some very nice features (I particularly like the desktop gadgets!). However, if like me, you like to play a lot of old games still and you have some older hardware that you really don’t see why you should have to upgrade, then you may want to think twice. Hopefully in time, many of the compatibilty problems can be ironed out, but for me, I think I will just stick with my trusty install of Windows XP, where I know everything works just fine thank you very much!
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