Gaming On Windows 7
Jason Wilson writes "Windows 7 comes out Oct. 22, and many gamers are wondering whether it will be a boon for gaming, as Microsoft promised Vista would, or a disappointment (like Vista was at its launch). Former ExtremeTech editor Jason Cross, who's covered games and tech for 13 years, discusses the pluses and minuses of Windows 7 for gamers — how it differs from Vista, if it'll run older games, and the benefits of 64-bit computing. 'Windows 7 basically takes the Vista codebase and rewrites, refines, optimizes, and overhauls most of the internal stuff without making dramatic changes to the driver stacks that Vista did over WinXP. The changes to the fundamental driver models are small and mostly serve to improve performance. Plus, the hardware makers — especially the graphics guys — are on top of the changes this time around. Nvidia and ATI have been shipping quite good Win7 graphics drivers for months now.'"
In the special case where you:
- have an Nvidia card
- don't mind using Nvidia's closed-source drivers
Then setting up dual, hardware-accelerated screens on Linux is also trivially easy -- just run nvidia-settings.
I hold it, that a little rebellion, now and then, is a good thing. -- Thomas Jefferson
I cannot remember when I last had a bluescreen in XP or any reason to wish for a better sound implementation.
the sound implementation in Windows Vista and Windows 7 have one thing going for them over XP and older: You can now set and mix volumes at an application level. That gives you the option to quiet down or even silence a particularly annoying program altogether so irrelevant notification beeps won't interfere with a game you're playing or movie that you're watching. It can be surpisingly useful at times.
There is a classic theme, what are you talking about? Desktop Personalization > Basic and High Contrast Themes > Windows Classic.
loldongs dongslol