"Good chunk of the time"??? Come on! Get real. You can use it for free for 10 months without shutdowns. Most trials are for 30 days or less, and now you are whining because they "only" give you 5 extra months to use their product for free - without nags or shutdowns, after the final October release date. Wow - you sure have an unusual sense of what you think you are entitled to.

I appreciate the time they are appearing to make the OS available for free

Appearing to make available for free??? What does that mean? Win7 is secretly tapping into our bank accounts?

It's free. You got your money's worth. I would suggest hunting for something significant to complain about.

Originally Posted by Digerati

Interesting! Announced yesterday, Windows XP Mode.

Hmmm, How many Intel CPUs will fail the XP Mode test in Windows 7? | Ed Bott’s Microsoft Report | ZDNet.com.

Ok you don't have to bash me.

You're right - I apologize if it seemed a bit too harsh - it just seemed with each of your replies that my message was not getting through. Please understand I will defend your right to bash MS when due - but I will defend MS when the bashing is not due too.

People forget Vista code was released to 3rd party developers for nearly a year before Vista came out - this includes big players like ZoneAlarm. Vista's slow acceptance was due to 3rd party driver developers dragging their feet, poor marketing by Microsoft, and very biased IT press/media. But also, people were generally happy with the way XP performed - all the while complaining XP was not secure. Yet the irony, and injustice here is most people don't know and don't care to research the facts. Users demanded XP support legacy DOS/Win3.x/95-era, expensive (at the time) but insecure hardware and software. McAfee and Symantec promised to protect us and Congress and the EU believed them. And NO ONE predicted how insidious BADguys would be in their attempt to exploit our computers, us and our children. Badguys created today's security issues, not MS.

So with Vista and Windows Genuine Advantage, MS attempts to clamp down on security and software piracy (a major avenue for malware distribution). But because it adversely affected a few - the biased media and MS bashers have a heyday - totally oblivious to fact the vast majority of the 100s of millions of Vista users are having no problems with Vista.

No doubt MS made some blunders with the release of Vista - but they listened to criticism and have made some significant changes in their methodology - and open communication with users.

Originally Posted by townsbg

It would be interesting to find out if the 1.5 gb is still hardware reserved in the 64-bit. Maybe there is a limitation?!

Will be interesting.

I just loaded RC1 on my upgraded "Internet Computer" with 4GB RAM.

Windows reports 4GB with 3.33GB in use and 768MB in Hardware Reserve.

So from my two installs "Hardware Reserve" is in direct measure to graphics RAM.

4GB - 1.5GB in my SLi setup and 4GB - 768MB in the latter.

As I noted earlier I always thought the graphics RAM was independent (hence additional) but these reports are indeed interesting.

All being said 4GB is still more RAM than an average system will ever use. In both cases I have at least 50% available.

Is your graphics card RAM completely independent or is part of it "shared" memory? Doesn't that mean that it really uses your system's RAM? Mine is independent so when I get around to installing it I'll look. Did you install 64 or 32 bit? I'll probably install both and forget about XP x64.

But yes most people shouldn't need anymore than 2.

32 and yes the cards are totally independent.

Let us know what you get.