Steve Ballmer Directing "House Party 7"

theodp writes "What are you doing on Oct. 22? Microsoft is putting a Tupperware-style twist on the upcoming Windows 7 rollout, launching a new initiative to encourage thousands of employees, partners and technology enthusiasts to throw parties in their homes and communities to demonstrate and help spread the word about its new OS. People accepted as official launch party hosts will get their own copy of Windows 7 Ultimate Edition, and a chance to win a computer. Host spaces are very limited, so apply now, kids. Hey, what could possibly go wrong?"

Comments

Re:There is a lot new in Windows 7

[roc97007]

I think the issue here is that I'm not getting Windows 7 so I can have a new operating system; I'm getting it to do a particular task. In this case, a home media center. What I've noticed:

It has native support for SATA3. Disk operations, specifically file transfers, are MUCH faster. Big improvement over previous version.

It recognized my HDTV card and supported it without me having to dink with it. Big improvement. Same with memory card multi-reader. Very nice.

Network seems faster. I hope to do some more testing this weekend.

Windows 7 supports my multi-core proc natively (no driver necessary) and seems to do a better job of task management. Big win here.

However:

Graphics on games fail in the same way -- Spore, for instance, tears and flickers as it did before. I didn't expect Windows 7's new graphics features to fix this, but was hoping.

S/PDIF ceased working after installing Windows 7. It sees the device but no sound comes out. This is a bummer. I hope there is a fix for this.

Media Center does not recognize video in mkv containers, even though media player will play them. Previous version would play them fine. Don't have a solution for this yet.

Desktop improvements? Not interesting. Winders is an OS, not an application. When I get time, I will be turning off all the fancy-dancy eye candy. I want the CPU to work on my applications, now how they are presented.

So, for me, Windows 7 gave me some very welcome compatibility with my existing hardware, (but not the video card, unfortunately) at the cost of a couple of hiccups. Generally positive, especially if I can fix the last remaining issues. But... $300? You're kidding, right? Throw a party? Gimme a break.