Recomendation: Windows 7 or XP ? (1 Viewer)

[Djang]

The driver support... I can amen that.
I had to download allot of strange patches and fixes. I even have an installed custom Nforce driver pack.
But after all that, everything runs smoothly.

I surelly want to know how people get every video running smoothly on 7.

 

[2BitSculptor]

I'm thinking 7 if you are able. XP has it's days numbered. Already MS has stopped support on XPsp1 and sp2. I'm still on XPsp3 only because upgrading to 7 is a bit pricey at this time.

Chuck

 

[funkstar]

I surelly want to know how people get every video running smoothly on 7.

SAF 5 pretty much does it for me.

I don't have a lot of weird encodes that some people have, but SAF handles pretty much everything anyway, and it tailored for use with MP.

 

[Baboonanza]

Likewise, though I use SAF 4 on Windows 7.

The only playback issue I've experienced is with files that seem to screw up ATi's DXVA drivers (ie they don't play in any program, even on a different machine with a Radeon 5850 in).

I'm completely done with XP, 7 is just too big an improvement.

 

[porky996t]

I have to say (on the strength of this thread and another problem related to my DVD player) I upgraded to Windows 7 yesterday. I did a completely clean install, and with the exception of having to get a new wifi card, it went well, although I'm on the learning curve with Win 7

My observation is that MP has never run so smooth and quickly. I'm amazed at the difference, not only in booting up, but in channel switching and menu navigation. I just have to do a bit of fine tuning (why can't I leave things alone ) and source the correct drivers for the onboard gaphics and I'm done. This thing seems so stable, and now works like I would have expected it to work from the off. Channel changes are down to about 1 sec, and this is between HD and Standard def

In a word, I'm impressed, and have fallen back in love with MP again!



M

 

[pauljghosh]

My experience has not been so great with Windows 7 probably because of the hardware configuration. I have a laptop, E6400 by Dell, that I am using as an HTPC. I upgraded to Windows 7. The problem was the automatic detection of external monitors built into Windows 7. Every time I would turn on the Plasma, after it had been off before, the laptop would make the ta-ding sound of plugnplay and then Media Portal would shift to the laptop LCD screen even though configuration in Media Portal is set to the external display. Once the shift would happen Media Portal would become non-responsive. It would also not shift back to the display it was set to run on. So, I searched and searched for a way to turn off the plugnplay feature of Windows 7. Since the laptop is running a NVIDIA Quadro NVS160M I came up empty - apparently NVIDIA does not have a way to turn off automatic detection. I did not find a way to turn off automatic detection in Windows 7 either. ATI does. They have an option for doing manual detection of monitors. So, sadly I returned to Windows XP SP3. With the DivX H.264 and AC3Filter being the primary codecs I can watch 1080p DD5.1/DTS content read from a SMB share on a Netgear Infrant NV+ over a gigabit connection without any issues.

Setting the primary display as being the Plasma only and shutting the lid of the laptop also turned out to be unreliable as sometimes the screen would be black and blank and no amount of remote or mouse or keyboard activity would bring back Media Portal or anything else for that matter on the Plasma.

 

[funkstar]

That's not a W7 problem, that's an nvidea problem

If ATI can have an option then so can nvidea, which they don't. I have to admit, i've not come across any HDMI issues with turning my TV on and off in W7 or MediaPortal with on board ATI graphics.