windows 7

[Nosferatu]

...running amazingly well and the laptop is far from brand new.

What Rokku is saying makes sense... I found 7 to be more efficient than XP when installed on the same hardware actually.

[Rokku]

What Rokku is saying makes sense... I found 7 to be more efficient than XP when installed on the same hardware actually.

What's different about 7 is that it was rebuilt from the ground up. XP was just a rehash of 2000 which was just a rehash of NT. In previous versions of Windows the development was given to separate teams of developers with no one really making sure that all the pieces had a logical flow to them, so you would end up 5 different commands to execute one thing because the parts were designed in modules. For Windows 7 they threw that concept out the window, and as well they should because it's insane. Windows 7 was developed by one team with a project manager over seeing the entire process, so what you end up with is a more complete end product that runs smoother because it really was developed as a whole system and not just parts of a system. That's what Apple has been doing for years, i know, so don't go out and buy a Mac because you read here that you have to. If you have a PC, load windows 7 on it and give it a go, it's cheaper than buying a new machine.

[bumtsch]

A word of warning on 7*.
On some setups the Audio 8 driver makes windows's own usbport.sys barf, and that's not a good thing.
That system driver will throw some pretty nasty dpc spikes, which occur at very regular intervals - when this happens cpu usage goes up significantly and if you have many effect units enabled in traktor... you'll start hearing some nasty crackling.
One of the software engineers over at NI has the issue himself, there is a known issue in the knowledge base over at MS with a hotfix that didn't alleviate the problem for him (and me neither with a similar issue on vista 32).

But of course, dear reader, if you were thinking of switching to 7 you already had a test phase on an alternate boot planned, didn't ya?