Windows 7: Great, hardware HD acceleration works out of the box.

I have onbored Intel GMA X4500HD which intel claims has hardware acceleration for HD movie playback.
I could never get this to work properly with vista even with the power dvd HD codec installed?

I also tried all the dodgy codec packs available (which in my experience courses more harm than good) in my quest for low cpu usage during 1080p or just any HD playback in general really. And although my monitor isn't even a HD monitor it's still above standard definition & I just like to know things are working as there advertised I guess? Plus I plan to get a HD monitor when my finances permit me to?

I also had this problem with my old pc with an ati card installed aswell.

Anyways I installed windows 7 & hardware acceleration works right out of the box, literally. No codecs & no messing about it just works as advertised. The codecs are there already & work as they should do for once. My cpu usage is down from 30/70% to 0/20% max now. It was 70/100% without any codecs & 30/70 was the best I could get with vista.

With Windows 7 Microsoft has really hit the nail on the head for me, so to speak. Bootup times are so fast & so far I haven't had to install a single codec for once.

It's like a refined vista with all the same features plus a few more just for good measure.

Well, glad to have you on the site. That certainly is one of the beauties of new operating systems. It's often much faster to get it setup and working again. And for those of us who tinker endlessly with our PC's...that can save us a lot of time.

I've been pretty darn happy with Windows 7 myself. No complains, ordered a copy of Vista 64 for my new build with a free upgrade to Windows 7. At present, I'm running Win 7 RC1 and have no plans to put Vista on this machine...just going to install Windows 7 and go from there.

GEAH

Wait till you get to know it. You will love it. I was so annoyed by the vista thing I stayed on XP till win 7 beta. Its on every thing I own


Ken

Well, I'm certainly going to run Windows 7 on my primary gaming box and new build. However, I do plan to stay with Vista on my wife's HP laptop...primarily because it works 100% fine, and HP has a nice utility already there to reset it right back to factory defaults if anything goes wrong...and finally it won't cost me anything to leave it be.

I've got one other computer which runs some flavor of Linux about 99.9% of the time and has XP on it for some hardware compatibility that I have with an old scanner and a webcam that I have.

So, rather than doing the same thing everywhere...I prefer to mix it up a bit

pparks

I was thinking the same thing because I have some older hardware. Just to see I put it on an ol dell P-IV, 3.0 512mem, and haven't had to touch it since. I use it for a back up server and media streaming.

Ken

I even get a higher system score with Windows 7 than I did with vista?, even with my aging pentium d cpu. I must admit to being very skeptical about Windows 7 after vista which was a very love hate os for me.

I think any older system that can just about run vista would do alot better with Windows 7 in my opinion? Theres alot less of a transition than there was moving from xp in terms of compatibility at least. The only problems i've had are from my modem drivers & an explorer.exe issue which is probably a result of the modem drivers anyway?

Plus I must admit that Windows 7 just looks so much dam slicker than vista did & vista looked good. It might just be eye candy but it's always nicer when things function as well as they look.

Yeah, you have pretty much hit the nail on the head. Windows 7 works as it should and is going to be a much better OS for the general public than Vista ever was.

Microsoft certainly hopes so... General business too.