Windows 7

[GHD]

My main compatabilty concern was not so much W7 but 64bit

The only program which I couldn't run on 64bit W7 was the MS Visual Studio 2003. All of my other design tools work perfectly.

[TSR2]

Cheers Ben

TBH I've not personally heard of any issues so nit's very much a stanby if needed thing.

My main compatabilty concern was not so much W7 but 64bit

Some of the stuff that the guys had been working on over at fsdeveloper.com had issues with x64 back when it was Windows Vista, but all of it, to the best of my knowledge was updated prior to Windows 7 being released. The x64 OS is pretty clever with the way it handles 32bit apps, so you would never know in most cases.

[Garry Russell]

Thanks Ben

I did have a memory leak in FS.x

After I added SP1 and SP2 that went

The guy setting this up researched that and found that was one of the issues fixed in the SP upgrades.

It must have been the Vista issues you mention that was in the back of my mind.

Come to think about it I've not read anything recently and the intervening time has been more than enough to fix the bugs that show up early on.

[Airspeed]

Seeing as nearly every other member has replied to this post, I'll stick my two bob's worth in...
I'm running FS9 FSX and a stack of add ons without any W7 conflict. 3 days back, I had to re instal FSX to allow Acceleration to instal. I simply copied the whole 9Gb SIM OBJECTS folder into the new installation. I renamed the main FSX to the original title, and all the add ons are happily talking to it. I would have thought networking the new/old units and copying the scenery and sim objects would be the way to go. My sims are in C:\FS9 and C:\FSX. I'm not technically capable of saying whether where I've got them interferes with 64bit processing, but I have no fps issues. I can say that when they were buried in their default locations, I had no end of trouble with add ons not being able to find them. Also because I use Autostar and autostrx, note that there are NO SPACES in the directory names. I reckon Garry wins the prize for most replies in the shortest number of days! You'll grow to love W7 Garry.

[Garry Russell]

Cheers Mike

As I mentioned it's the 64 that was concerning me , but perhaps later today I'll get back onto loading stuff on and see if anythings happens which appears to be unlikely

[tonymadge]

Garry a late reply but this thread has answered a lot of questions I was about to ask , cheers guys
After using my faithful 7 year old laptop the Fujitsu Amilo AMD 3700 I decided that it would be a good idea to upgrade. I bought this morning from Dabs a Fujitsu AH530 with a Intel CORE i3 380M / 2.5 GHz CPU 4gb Ram 500gb H/D all this for £329! I have upped the ram to 8gb only £15 from Offtek.
It comes with W7 64bit . In all a decent deal and 1/4 of the price I paid for the Amilo!!
Now it has intel graphics but I know they are better than the old ones however I dont expect great performance, but my Amilo has Radeon 9700 which runs COD FS9 at a reasonable level so I guess 7 years down the line the Intel 3000 graphics should at least match that. I have opted for more memory as I heard W7 64 bit will address more ram? PLus I can designate more ram to the graphics?
I love XP Pro and would avoid W7 at all costs but its a no choice option so I will see how I go with it and tweak it as much as I can so it looks like XP

[TSR2]

Hi Tony,

W7 x64 can address more RAM than you can shake a stick at, however your laptop (like all on the market) will only support a specific amount, typically 8 or 16GB on Laptops, but you should be able to get this from the spec. The modern on board graphics controllers are generally very good, but the real performace only comes with the core i5 or core i7 units as nowadays its the cpu that does the processing for the intel graphics chip. Memory is usually dynamically used by the intel graphics controllers, and it does this well so dont worry too much about "alocating RAM to the graphics card." I'd suggest 8GB will be more than ample, but ideally it should come as 2 x 4GB Dimms. Remember to chack the hard disk speed too, some have reverted back to 5400rpm as the floods in Thailand last year had an impact of hard disk supply. 7200rpm or better would be best

[tonymadge]

Hi Ben, as always good info
Yes it will take 8gb it comes with one 4gb stick, so I ordered another stick to match. Great so I dont have to allocate RAM for graphics
Yes it is the i3 but at the price it was a good buy as it wont be a gamer more of an all sorts machine. I dont expect great things but it should be capable, your right re HD most laptops use 5400rpm unless you pay a premium and get an all singing dancing i5 or i7 with power and performance but normally at a greater cost.
I got my Dad a Toshiba pc with very similar spec the CPU was the next model down 2.4 and the ram was 6gb in the sale earlier this year, that runs very quickly for normal use so I am hoping this will match that.
I may be tempted to put FS9 and FSRepainter on it but I wonder if that last one will run on W7 64bit?

[TSR2]

Hi Tony,

The i3 is a very capable little cpu and will more than meet your needs i reckon. Not sure what the graphics on COD will be like, but should be fine. Re FS repainter, W7 x64 is very clever and will run almost anything. The most common problem being the installer. Back in the day, when a developer was greating an installer for their product, they were presented with a selection of check boxes which listed the types of OS. So you might have had Windows 32 bit, Windows 64bit and Windows IA64 for argument sake. Most ticked the first box and left it at that. The trouble with these little tinkers is that the installer would aboard the installation before it really got started. There are lots of ways to change this behavior using tools like ORCA. You'll find that for almost all 32 bit programs, if you can get the installer to run, Win7 x64 will take care of the rest. If you've a program that wont install, let me know and I should be able to sort it.

Just one more thing, IF your going to install FS9 or any other thing that you want to change the files in, create a second partition and install FS9 in there. If you leave it to the default install path, you'll end up getting prompted every time you want to change a file as Win7 treats the programfiles directory as a system folder and keeps it more secure to protect the OS, which is normally fine for most programs, but with something like FS where we are in and out of the files and directories adding aircraft / repaints / scenery etc, its a pain in the arse.

[Garry Russell]

When installing I often get a message saying the programme may not have installed correctly

My sound card driver refuses to install and download speeds from the internet are slower than the netbook.