cdoublejj wrote:

7 has a lot more than dx10 and 11 as far as the original post is cornered. it can also make better use of the latest hardware than older OSes can. it also does OKAY with retro gaming as far as 32 bit is cornered but, it's not perfect.

It's certainly not perfect 🤣
As I said, Creative CMSS-3D for example seems pretty messed up on Windows 7. Even the helicopter test in the control panel sounds wrong.
Have yet to try any 256-colour games, but from what I've seen on friend's PCs I expect them to be broken too.

cdoublejj wrote:

are theses blue screens you are reporting on the new system in the original posts? windows 7 or windows 8?

Yes, I get these on my new system, both in XP x64 and 7 x64. Most seem to point to the Intel AHCI drivers. Haven't seen any with the Creative drivers so far 😀

cdoublejj wrote:

EDIT: oh yeah there is setup feature in windows 7 that sets up how you like your fonts and screen settings by answering some questions. (like the eye doctor)

I assume you mean the cleartype tuner. I ran that, but my settings on questions 3 and 4 don't seem to be saved correctly. With question 3 you can supposedly switch between subpixel rendering and greyscale antialiasing. But it looks like that only works in WPF applications like Visual Studio. I disabled Cleartype entirely now, and now most fonts look like they did on XP (not that that was any good, but at least it's better than subpixel rendering).

jwt27 wrote:

Samsung Magician has a simple benchmark tool too, and shows these results now: […]
Show full quote

Samsung Magician has a simple benchmark tool too, and shows these results now:

So how do you like reading the files in your SSD @ 17.5GB per second? 😎

Can't say I really notice the difference so far. I guess 550MB/s was fast enough already 🤣

Cache hit rate is not that great though. Currently it's at 12.5% but then I just ran a full virus scan so that may have dropped the hit rate a bit.

I'm having some issues with Windows 7 (or my new hardware):

- In Visual Analyzer, I can select 96kHz sampling rate as usual, but it only shows 24kHz bandwidth meaning it's just upsampling from 48kHz! How can I make it use 96kHz like before? One good thing is that I can now select 24-bit which didn't work on XP... but higher sampling rates are much more important to me!

- In some games, like Skyrim and Pirates of Persia (errr... I mean Assassins Creed 4. got that for free with my gfx card) I can select any resolution, but lower resolutions are upscaled to 1280x960. I think this has something to do with DX10, since Rune does the same thing when I use the DX10 renderer, but not with DX9/OpenGL. How do I disable this scaling completely?

- I want to access shared folders from my DOS machine over IPX... Is that even possible with Win7?

Any help with this is much appreciated 😀

Also I fixed the problem I had with positional/CMSS-3D audio. Had to downgrade the drivers to the ones I used on XP (Daniel_K's X-Fi Support Pack 2.5)

In case you are using a Nvidia card, try creating a custom resolution in the driver?

d1stortion wrote:

In case you are using a Nvidia card, try creating a custom resolution in the driver?

I did that, but Skyrim, AC4 and Rune DX10 just seem to ignore it. Kinda weird why it picks 1280x960, if it tried to upscale to a "native" resolution I would expect it to use 2048x1536 instead.

Some screenshots from the relevant NVCPL pages:
http://i.imgur.com/w12quvJ.png
http://i.imgur.com/C53q4qP.png

edit: Fixed it! I used Custom Resolution Utility to remove all supported resolutions (as reported by the monitor's EDID ROM). Now games have no choice but to use the custom resolution defined in nvcpl, and 1024x768 now works as expected 😀

See the screenshot, only custom resolutions are listed now:

Not sure why but my display is also actually detected as "Eizo F930" now instead of "Eizo Analog Display"...?

I've noticed that accurate detection of analog displays seem to be easily affected by the selection of a less-than-ideal VGA cable.

jwt27 wrote:

- I want to access shared folders from my DOS machine over IPX... Is that even possible with Win7?

Why not stick with mTCP? Everyone seems to like that. Or am I not understanding the question?

Jorpho wrote:

I've noticed that accurate detection of analog displays seem to be easily affected by the selection of a less-than-ideal VGA cable.

I think the monitor's EDID data is just sub-optimal. For example it only lists 2048x1536 at 75Hz while it's capable of 80Hz. Also it supports 60Hz on all resolutions (of course) which means many games that don't have a refresh rate option will stick to that.
I'd rather use a cable with RGB/HV BNC connectors so Windows doesn't get a chance to read EDID at all, but I could never get that to work.

Jorpho wrote:

Why not stick with mTCP? Everyone seems to like that. Or am I not understanding the question?

I could use mTCP's FTP server, of course, but for file/printer sharing I find MS Network Client a bit more versatile and easier to use.
Supposedly it is possible to install XP's IPX driver on Win7. But I can't find some of these files on my XP x64 install (specifically nwlnkfwd.sys, nwlnkflt.sys, and rtipxmib.dll). When I try to install it anyway, I get "the specified module could not be found".

You could always install the TCP/IP stack for the MS Network Client. I'm able to browse shares on my Win8.1 desktop from WFW 3.11 using that.

True... but have you seen how much conventional memory that takes..? 😉

jwt27 wrote:

True... but have you seen how much conventional memory that takes..? 😉

Aint that the truth.

But there's no need to keep it loaded all the time, I just run "net start" when needed.

SquallStrife wrote:

jwt27 wrote:

True... but have you seen how much conventional memory that takes..? 😉

Aint that the truth.

But there's no need to keep it loaded all the time, I just run "net start" when needed.

I know, and I already did that with IPX, but AFAIK there's no way to unload it besides ctrl-alt-del. I don't really like that...

Guess I don't have much choice, so I'm trying to install the TCP stack now. Setup says it needs some files from the install disks, and the only way I see to get these files on there is... over the network 🤣

Pretty sure "net stop" unloads it, just like "net start" loads it.

SquallStrife wrote:

Pretty sure "net stop" unloads it, just like "net start" loads it.

That does log you off from the workgroup and unload some parts, but not all of it.

jwt27 wrote:

The Cleartype everywhere is horrible though.

It's funny you mention that. ClearType is probably the #1 thing i miss on older systems. A dude over at MSFN came up with a sub-pixel anti-aliaser for NT4 & 2000 called "SmoothText" and it helps a great deal but it's still not ClearType. I just hate the jaggies. (Incidentally, the bastardization of ClearType in Window 8 is one of it's many less mentioned but still odious sins of that OS).

EverythingOldIsNewAgain wrote:

jwt27 wrote:

The Cleartype everywhere is horrible though.

It's funny you mention that. ClearType is probably the #1 thing i miss on older systems. A dude over at MSFN came up with a sub-pixel anti-aliaser for NT4 & 2000 called "SmoothText" and it helps a great deal but it's still not ClearType. I just hate the jaggies. (Incidentally, the bastardization of ClearType in Window 8 is one of it's many less mentioned but still odious sins of that OS).

Don't get me wrong, I think Cleartype looks great on LCDs (or any display with discrete pixels)... But I don't use an LCD 😉

I'd prefer greyscale anti-aliasing with no or very little font hinting instead.. but there's no way to enable that (reliably) in Windows. So if I have to choose between jagged or randomly coloured edges, I'll take the jaggies.

jwt27 wrote:

EverythingOldIsNewAgain wrote:

jwt27 wrote:

The Cleartype everywhere is horrible though.

It's funny you mention that. ClearType is probably the #1 thing i miss on older systems. A dude over at MSFN came up with a sub-pixel anti-aliaser for NT4 & 2000 called "SmoothText" and it helps a great deal but it's still not ClearType. I just hate the jaggies. (Incidentally, the bastardization of ClearType in Window 8 is one of it's many less mentioned but still odious sins of that OS).

Don't get me wrong, I think Cleartype looks great on LCDs (or any display with discrete pixels)... But I don't use an LCD 😉

I'd prefer greyscale anti-aliasing with no or very little font hinting instead.. but there's no way to enable that (reliably) in Windows. So if I have to choose between jagged or randomly coloured edges, I'll take the jaggies.

OK I can agree with that then. I've tried ClearType on CRTs and it is sort of blurry more than anything else.

Funny enough, I think Windows 8 actually has what you want (first time that phrase has been spoken!) in that environment - greyscale anti-aliasing. At least that seems to be the consensus as to why it looks weird on LCDs compared to 7/Vista/XP.

I migrated to LCDs relatively early because I found them smoother on the eyes - I don't know how else to describe it other than "smoother". (very technical, I know) Until I discovered various forums such as this one, I didn't fully realize you were giving up anything (other than response time in early LCDs). I'd sort of love to get a hold of a modern, large, CRT, but I can't justify the expense and don't really have the space. It'll have to go on my list of "things to do"...

EverythingOldIsNewAgain wrote:

OK I can agree with that then. I've tried ClearType on CRTs and it is sort of blurry more than anything else.

Funny enough, I think Windows 8 actually has what you want (first time that phrase has been spoken!) in that environment - greyscale anti-aliasing. At least that seems to be the consensus as to why it looks weird on LCDs compared to 7/Vista/XP.

Oh wow! Good to see they finally thought about us poor CRT users..! Err, just looked it up and turns out that's actually a cheap hack to improve font rendering on tablets, because subpixel antialiasing looks really bad when you rotate your screen 90°...

EverythingOldIsNewAgain wrote:

I migrated to LCDs relatively early because I found them smoother on the eyes - I don't know how else to describe it other than "smoother". (very technical, I know) Until I discovered various forums such as this one, I didn't fully realize you were giving up anything (other than response time in early LCDs). I'd sort of love to get a hold of a modern, large, CRT, but I can't justify the expense and don't really have the space. It'll have to go on my list of "things to do"...

Trust me, once you've seen an Eizo F930 you won't ever look back! 😀

I'm now trying to get my audio programs to work as they should, on Windows 7. Of course the whole audio stack was overhauled and that's why I considered Win7 to be a downgrade at first. I knew it would take some time to get used to it, but man, this is testing the limits of my patience here! Not sure if it's only caused by Windows 7 or if the Creative drivers just suck.

First of all there's the resampling to 48k issue when recording. I actually got it to work at 96kHz. What I did is... changing audio modes from creation->entertainment->creation->game->etc, changing the master sampling rate, switching to and from 2/4/5/7 channels, enabling/disabling cmss/eax/etc, enabling/disabling bit-matched, etc, etc. Basically, changing every setting there is. At some point it randomly works at 96kHz.. but then after switching to a different line-in or playing sound in some other program it drops back to 48kHz and I have to perform the whole ritual again.

Then I have this weird stereo-widening effect while playing sounds. It seems as if the left and right channels are 30-45° out of phase or something. It's easy to check by playing a mono sound and switching between mono/stereo on the amplifier... there's a huge difference in sound and it shouldn't be there! Performing the above ritual in no particular order will sometimes fix it, but just like the resampling it will return at random.

And there's some really bad crosstalk. I mean really bad. Playing a mono sound on the left channel only, and turning balance to the right, I can actually hear the left sound on the right channel! And with this issue, nothing I do seems to help. Remember this is a €350 sound card with sub-100dB crosstalk on paper (..and on XP).

I won't say XP's audio stack was all that magnificent. It had it's weird quirks too.. but at least it was predictable!
Now I feel like ranting about the horrible audio control panel design and it's settings hidden under settings hidden under other settings... but maybe I should leave that for another time...

Anyone else had any of these problems with Windows 7? (with or without Creative card)

I've had similar and far worse issues with a Creative card, and that was on XP. The drivers do suck. Only onboard does what it's supposed to do really.