Thursday, April 2, 2009

Windows 7 beta build 7068 on ASUS R2H

I haven’t noticed much change since build 7057 aside from a few small things. People using P2P TVs and torrents will be glad to know the new limit for half-open connections was raised to 120 where before it was as low as 10 connections, no need to use 3rd party tools to hack the tcpip.sys. This also the first leaked build that allows to choose which Windows 7 edition to install (see the feature list comparison here) – keep in mind that the key you got when downloading the build 7000 is for Ultimate edition - I found it complained when I chose to validate it with Professional edition, there might be some upgrade feature somewhere. There’s also a new build of Windows Media Player, 12.0.7068.0. Windows Experience Index is same as build 7057.

A few small performance tips, if you haven’t got a lot of those already :-)

  • Choose No Sounds scheme – that might speed things up a bit when moving about in Explorer;
  • Also for Explorer, in Folder Options choose Always show icons, never thumbnails.
    Since already there you might want to deselect the Hide extensions for known file types (I always found that one creating more confusion than being actually helpful);
  • Go to Device Manager > Disk Drives > HTCxxxxx ATA Device > Policies (tab) and select the Turn off Windows write-cache buffer flushing on the device, see if it helps with I/O performance:

w7_write_cache_flush