To use the Win7 upgrade disc.. or to not?

[Roadburner440]

As you all have seen with the T-38 in the interest of filming it with FRAPS and all that really showed me how inadequate my PC was at doing anything else other than running FSX by itself. I wound up OC'ing my i7-950 to 4ghz stable, with temps within limits, and am able to run the stress tests of my choice through their paces without crashing. Either way in searching for other ways to improve performance I was looking at my video card (a GTX 285 1GB), but doing a lot of research on Avsim led me toward not spending the money. So the big question remains as to whether I should go from Vista to Win 7, and what are the possible repricussions of doing so? Was also looking at getting a 990X.. Know the other 2 cores will not help, but on Newegg the 990X is actually cheaper somehow than the old 975 or even 980X.

Rest of the PC Specs are Asus P6T Deluxe V2 mobo, 6GB of RAM, main drive is a 750GB 7200RPM drive, and the FSX drive is a 150GB 10,000RPM drive. Right now pushing a 167 bclk with the multiplier at max (24).. The other reason I want the Extreme edition chip to have the unlocked multiplier so I don't have to mess with my RAM timings/voltage as much. Thanks in advance for any help.

[Bjoern]

Vista -> 7 isn't much of a leap compared to XP -> 7.

If you've got Vista running well, just wait till your next "Hm, this installation is too cluttered. Need to reinstall Windows." moment and run the upgrade.

[Gdavis101]

I have done the upgrade a couple of times and it seems to work just fine, but personally I prefer the fresh install, that way if there is anything malicious hiding on your c drive, it will be gone. I have had some bad experiences with virus infected computers and upgrading to Windows 7 though.. The best part of Windows 7 is that Vista is gone!

[gigabyte]

I have done both an upgrade from Vista and a fresh install and in my case both worked just fine and I really can't say one was better than the other, the Win 7 upgrade install is pretty darn through and it is faster than a format & fresh install. I actually did the upgrade on my old Dual Core Media Center and it was only slightly faster than Vista, I ended up wiping it later and doing a dual boot Vista and Win 7 just to compare and what really made the biggest difference was bumping the RAM to 8GB when I did that Win 7 blew Vista out of the water.

I went for Win 7 on my gaming rig right away and started with 6GB, again I found I still got some shudders in FSX so I bumped it to 12, and poof just like magic huge improvement. I have always found all versions of Windows and especially Vista & 7 love headroom, the more RAM you can make available the better the performance.

[Roadburner440]

Well... the computer itself is ONLY used for FSX. That is the other thing. Unless I am flying it is covered, and turned off. I was just wondering mainly for performance reasons what anyone has done it though. Think I got the answer I was looking for, and that I should wait till something happens to the PC to do it. I just really hope that when Flight comes out it makes use of multicore processors, and our GPU power. So that way us trying to squeek every last mhz out of our systems will at least not be so dire as it is now. :icon_lol:

[fliger747]

SteveGlad to be rid of vista, w7 seems to be a pretty good operating system and runs fsx pretty well, even on a laptop. On my floor top I still have expee, which I was able to get with that operating system after vista came out. I do have a new computer in my photo studio, which I haven't yet installed fsx. I expect that it would/will be a good rig. it has the advantage of having nothing but photo stuf on it. Had a win 7 crash yesterday which took a while to recover from. Need to just get a lot of things of of it. That is the only computer that spends it's life on the net, a fact mostly responsible for any glitches. Good luck. T

[Guruswarmyoz]

Personally i would ditch Vista as soon as practically possible as Windows7 is a lot more stable operating system etc...
You can do a clean install using the upgrade versions, see here:
http://www.winsupersite.com/article/win7/clean-install-windows-7-with-upgrade-media

[Roadburner440]

Thanks for the link.. I will be saving this for when I do a clean wipe of the whole PC (most likely whenever my FSX HDD dies). Certaintly an interesting article though. Certaintly looks like a pretty simple process at least.