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Microsoft has a habit of forcing people to upgrade to newer and newer versions of its windows and forcing users to upgrade their hardware. It does this in order to generate profit for itself and its partners in the hardware business. The way it does this is to put more and more layers of its windows operating system into interpreted languages and drivers. In other words, programs have less and less ability to directly talk to the hardware, and must talk through an intermediate layer of either virtual drivers, or communicate through a layer that is programmed in interpreted languages. Interpreted languages are slow by design because they emulate the hardware in software. In other words, there is a software CPU executing a language that runs on it. The code for the software CPU is what runs on the actual CPU hardware chip.

Languages like Java and C# and its associated managed programming environment are all interpreted by nature. Even if they are sped up using hot spot compiling or just in time compiling, or any of the other techniques, they still are interpreted (meaning there is another layer that is doing translating from virtual instructions to actual hardware CPU instructions). This is extremely slow. It is because of this trend that Microsoft Vista had such bad press. Essentially, all old hardware peripherals did not work because Vista ALSO forced you to get newer hardware by purposely not supporting older hardware. It is such a sad fact that Windows 7 is essentially Vista, and if you install it, it will not support your perfectly working older hardware by simply not releasing or making drivers for older peripherals older than 2 years. In other words, you gotta buy new hardware.

Many people after installing Vista found ways of getting newer drivers recognize old hardware by tinkering with the drivers themselves. Sometimes the hardware peripherals are the same, but the hardware ID was changed in newer editions of the peripheral. Vista and Windows 7 comes with newer drivers the essentially works on older peripherals if you trick the driver to support the older hardware by adding the old hardware id's to the new drivers. This worked for a while until they basically forced the compatibility out of the new drivers themselves. All in the name of profit for itself and the hardware companies.

There are tricks that can be done in the Windows 7 RC, however that may force it to work with older hardware peripherals. When you upgrade from a computer like XP with already working drivers for the older hardware peripherals, Windows 7 will use them in a backward compatible way (directly going at the hardware through a compatibility layer by talking to the older driver). If you install a fresh copy of Windows 7 RC (7100) and want to use older hardware peripheral drivers, some might work by installing the driver using Windows 7's compatibility setting. Note that not all drivers will work, but this seems to work for the latest Windows 7 RC (7100).

For example. If I wanted to install the Dell SoundBlaster Live! 5.1 (16-bit essentially) on Windows 7 RC (7100), you would do the following...

1) Locate the old drivers: http://ftp.us.dell.com/audio/R69382.EXE
2) Save it somewhere
3) Run it, and it will extract files to a directory: C:\Dell\Drivers\R69382\SBLA05W.EXE
4) Right click on SBLA05W.EXE when visiting it in Windows Explorer
5) Click "Compatibility" tab
6) Check "Run this program in compatibility mode for:"
7) Make sure you select "Windows XP (Service Pack 3)"
8) Click "Apply" button
9) Right click on SBLA05W.EXE again and click "Run as Administrator"
10) Go through the installation and reboot if necessary.

There you go, old drivers working on the Windows 7 RC.

Some people may not know what RC means, well it means Release Candidate. This is supposed to be the release before the final release in retail form. In this case, this is actually Windows 7 RC1, which means it is the Release Candidate 1. There may or may not be Release Candidate 2 or 3, but if yes, they will be called RC2 or RC3.

This RC1 version is actually version 7100. Other famous versions of Windows 7 that were leaked (on bittorrents) were:

Windows 7 7077
Windows 7 7068
Windows 7 7022
Windows 7 7000

Many of them were for the 32bit CPUs, with one or two also released for the 64bit systems.

Where is the effect when you minimize, maximize, starting, and exiting a window in Windows 7? Just yesterday my Windows 7 was working fine, the effects were there. But today when I use it the effects are gone. It's back to the crappy old windows xp effects.

jacinthey wrote:Where is the effect when you minimize, maximize, starting, and exiting a window in Windows 7? Just yesterday my Windows 7 was working fine, the effects were there. But today when I use it the effects are gone. It's back to the crappy old windows xp effects.

If you make any changes in the Ease of Access Center (see screenshot below), the visual effects settings get reset back to the default setting automatically.