Windows 7 release candidate review

So, the Windows 7 release candidate has been out for a good day or so. For those that haven't made the switch but are curious to, this review is for you.

Our personal experiences thus far have been almost all positive under the following system, running the x86 version:

MSI K9N6SGM-V DDR2 AM2 motherboard

OCZ Platinum XTC PC2-8500 2GB 2X1GB DDR2-1066 CL5-5-5-15 240PIN DIMM Dual Channel Memory Kit

MSI Radeon HD 4830 575MHZ 512MB 1.8GHZ GDDR3 2XDVI CrossFireX TV-OUT PCI-E Video Card (OC'd)

Western Digital Caviar Black 640GB 7200RPM 32MB Dual Proc 3.5IN SATA Hard Drive OEM 5YR Mfg Warranty

AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual Core Processor 5000+

Previously we'd upgraded from a torrented version of the initial beta to build 7057 (not recommended), greeted by many blue screens whilst gaming. The RC was done as a complete clean install, straight from Microsoft, and so far none of the previous errors have been encountered.

Little touches have been made since the beta, giving the OS a more finalized feel, as you'd expect. Boot and shutdown times, despite other reports which bring in Win7 as faster than Vista but slower than XP, have been much smoother and quicker than on the latter, by about ten seconds, give or take.

The only real problem appears to be occasional music stuttering if played while installing something, and this could be blamed on the fact we're running on a Vista driver. No problems testing multiple games, new and old (Cannon Fodder, Earthworm Jim, MDK, Screamer, Septerra Core, Fable, Dead Space), though extensive playtime is yet to be had (have to finish this article first!). Update: flawless!

In terms of hard numbers, PC Games Hardware took the OS to the test against Vista and XP, each in varying setups. There are some application benchmarks, but the results are so negligible they're not really worth posting. The real meat is in the gaming benchmarks, which do show marked improvements with almost every test, particurlary with DX10:

They're still not sure if Windows 7 will phase out XP, but to us it's already making it feel horribly dated (in spite of our love for it). Assuming you have your data backed up, based on our experience up to this point, we can't recommend switching enough. Bring on the final release!