I’ve some work coming up where I need to have Windows 7 running on my laptop. I went and bought a spare 250GB SATA drive for the laptop and was ready on Saturday (away from home) to rebuild. I used to own a HP DV9000 but it died (the day before a presentation in the UK) so, short of cash, I bought a cheap Sony Vaio at €680 or thereabouts. I opened the chassis because there’s no panel to make the drive easily accessible. That left me with around 20-25 screws of about 4 different sizes in a container. Then I saw that my laptop’s hard drive was effectively welded to the motherboard. It was screwed into a bracket. The screws were recessed behind the motherboard and the upper half of the case. The bracket was secure underneath of the motherboard. Eeeek! My work machine is a dell and the hard drive on it is removable by undoing two screws and pulling out a panel on the side. My DV9000’s drives were under two panels in the base.
That left me with no choice but to do a wipe. I “migrated” my user settings and data to a hard drive. I copied my more recent photos out as well as some VM’s.
I’d downloaded the x86 DVD for Windows 7 from TechNet and burned that to a DVD-RW. I fired it up and installed. I found the installation took longer than Vista. There’s little that I had to do, just like in Vista. I logged in and found this was no x86 installation. TechNet had supplied me with an x64 ISO image … the filename was actually “en_windows_7_beta_dvd_x86_x15-29073.iso” so I hadn’t made a mistake. I recovered my user settings (that worked superbly).
I installed Office 2007, Visio 2007 and VMware Workstation 6x. WHAT? Yes, I like MS virtualisation but Virtual PC doesn’t do what I need. I need real snapshots and better networking that VPC can offer. I rebooted and found I had a new user account on my machine for a VMware service. Disabling that account would cause the service to fail and stop VM’s from starting. So I re-enabled it. I would later find that VMware Workstation broke networking on my machine and would require a restore to a restoration point/rebuild (which I did).
Office seemed to work fine. My PST and settings were safely captured with no difficulty. My Documents was populated with everything. I’ve a few other bits’n’bobs in Live Mesh that I’ll recover.
I started messing with the thing on Saturday night – what an exciting life I lead! Valentines Day is for the weak minded who’ve fallen prey to the greatest marketing ploy ever launched.
The laptop scored a 3.0 in the performance rating. General operations were very quick. Booting up was fast as was sleep/restore. Windows Media Center was a bit sluggish but this is a beta 1 release and full of bug check code. I like the new gadgets. There’s no sidebar – you just dock your gadgets on the right side and can control their opacity. Wallpaper was a bit buggy – sometimes disappearing or going back to it’s original size. Photo rating in Explorer was not as good as in Media Center. I also found I had to refresh explorer manually to reflect things. Media Center seems to rely a lot on indexing so it can go out of whack with Explorer.
Libraries wasn’t as painful as I had expected. A library is a logical view of files from many designated folders. You can specialise a library for documents, music, pictures, etc. Unfortunately, you cannot build other search criteria into a library yet, e.g. “files that meet these criteria only”. It would be excellent if they did that.
There’s new functionality called DeviceStage for integrating with devices such as printers, cameras, phones, etc. The list of compatible devices is pretty small right now. Hopefully that will increase. Nothing I own was on the list so I haven’t tried it yet.
There’s a nice new addition for SOHO’s and homes with a few machines. HomeGroup is like a workgroup with a password. If you set your machine up you can be prompted to set up a HomeGroup and are given a password to print out. You can easily share every document, song or photo on your machine with others on the HomeGroup network. MediaCenter appears to be aware of this.
I got back to the house yesterday evening and tried to get online. Here’s where the pain started. I ended up doing a fresh build thanks to the aforementioned screwup of networking thanks to VMware Workstation. My wifi NIC was online and I could scan my network and those of the neighbours. However, no matter what I did, I could not get online. My work machine was fine and my Sony was fine when it ran Vista. I got on the wired network (in the hallway) and IE8 ran fine. I did some googling and found people having the same problem but with no resolution.
I decided to use my spare SATA drive and plug it into my work Dell Latitude D530. It was up in no time but it too could not authenticate with my wifi. I tried different wifi settings but no luck. It appears that Windows 7 is incompatible with my Linksys WRT54GS.
Doh! Luckily there’s a spare laptop at work that I can use. I’ll run it with Win7 on my wired network in my home office, rebuild my Sony with Vista and I’ve already replaced the Vista drive back into the Dell.
EDIT:
I finally got my laptop online with Windows 7. I upgraded my firmware (finally worked when I reset the router and used a Vista machine with IE7. Imagine using Vista for resolving compatibility issues!?!? That didn’t fix my wifi problem for Windows 7. I then changed the wireless channel from 13-2.472GHz to 11-2.462GHz. The profile on the Win7 laptop kicked in immediately and I’m now typing this update using my Windows 7 laptop with IE8.
EDIT #2:
OMG! The battery life on this thing is frackin’ fantastic now. I can get over 3 hours on a full charge using the out-of-the-box "power saver" mode with the wifi on. I wonder how much I might get with a custom "super power saver" mode?
I downloaded the beta versions of the new Live stuff. Windows 7 really comes alive when you "complete" it. I also like how fast my laptop is now compared to what it was like with Vista. I wonder how much faster it’ll be like when we get to Release Candidate stage?