windows xp vs 7

[lost11]

i'm thinking about upgrading my OS to windows 7 so i can use the SSD thats collecting dust. will i see any performance issues? i can dual box fine right now (i keep all my settings at low) with XP.

when i try to dual box at a friends computer, it lags really bad and he has windows vista. can someone share their exp with me from dual boxing in XP vs dual boxing in 7? thank you!

[Poyzon]

What are your system specs?

[lost11]

intel core 2 duo 6600 @ 2.40
i have 4 gigs of ram installed, but system is using 3.25gb
radeon hd 4770 512MB

i'll be installing windows 7 ultimate 64 bit on a intel 80gb gen 2 ssd. i'll only install the OS and probably world of warcraft on the SSD

[DLoweinc]

You'll see an increase in loading times for sure. Windows 7 memory management seems to be a lot better than XP and Vista both.

I initially started 5 boxing on a 2ghz dual core laptop with 4GB of RAM and windows XP (so not all RAM was usable). It was ok but lagged quite a bit.

When I moved to a quad core processor and SSD's I hit some limits because of the lower amount of vidoe memory (I had a radeon 4870, 512MB card). I had to upgrade to a 1GB 4890 to get rid of the bottleneck.

Basically there are a few places where you will hit bottlenecks. The sheer amount of data I/O when you load zones or textures (like in Dalaran for example) will tax your harddrive, an SSD will fix that, or at least make it as good as possible).

You should be fine on video too if you are only dual boxing. I've got my 4 "slaves" with "Low" settings and my "master" with settings on Ultra and it is fine. I get 60fps most times on the main and everything looks good.

If you do see any video issues you can always lower the screen resolution to help out.

Some other thing to consider when you start dual boxing is the Antialiasing in the video settings. Make sure you put that to 1 x (instead of 4, 8, 16 etc) because that will eat up all of your GPU...

[Ughmahedhurtz]

Win7 will slow down initial load times a bit but once everything's up and running, Win7 will be MUCH more stable and will perform better over longer sessions. Especially if you do things like surf Youtube and do other shit in the background while on flights and such.

I think that the thing that impresses me most about Win7 is that video driver crashes don't cause bluescreens anymore. Nothing like being in an instance, having your vid driver crash, and the system recovers quick enough to finish the fight.