I\u2019ve some work coming up where I need to have Windows 7 running on my laptop.\u00a0 I went and bought a spare 250GB SATA drive for the laptop and was ready on Saturday (away from home) to rebuild.\u00a0 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 \u20ac680 or thereabouts.\u00a0 I opened the chassis because there\u2019s no panel to make the drive easily accessible.\u00a0 That left me with around 20-25 screws of about 4 different sizes in a container.\u00a0 Then I saw that my laptop\u2019s hard drive was effectively welded to the motherboard.\u00a0 It was screwed into a bracket.\u00a0 The screws were recessed behind the motherboard and the upper half of the case.\u00a0 The bracket was secure underneath of the motherboard.\u00a0 Eeeek!\u00a0 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.\u00a0 My DV9000\u2019s drives were under two panels in the base.\n<\/p>\n
That left me with no choice but to do a wipe.\u00a0 I \u201cmigrated\u201d my user settings and data to a hard drive.\u00a0 I copied my more recent photos out as well as some VM\u2019s.\n<\/p>\n
I\u2019d downloaded the x86 DVD for Windows 7 from TechNet and burned that to a DVD-RW.\u00a0 I fired it up and installed.\u00a0 I found the installation took longer than Vista.\u00a0 There\u2019s little that I had to do, just like in Vista.\u00a0 I logged in and found this was no x86 installation.\u00a0 TechNet had supplied me with an x64 ISO image \u2026 the filename was actually \u201cen_windows_7_beta_dvd_x86_x15-29073.iso\u201d so I hadn\u2019t made a mistake.\u00a0 I recovered my user settings (that worked superbly).\n<\/p>\n
I installed Office 2007, Visio 2007 and VMware Workstation 6x.\u00a0 WHAT?\u00a0 Yes, I like MS virtualisation but Virtual PC doesn\u2019t do what I need.\u00a0 I need real snapshots and better networking that VPC can offer.\u00a0 I rebooted and found I had a new user account on my machine for a VMware service.\u00a0 Disabling that account would cause the service to fail and stop VM\u2019s from starting.\u00a0 So I re-enabled it.\u00a0 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).\n<\/p>\n
Office seemed to work fine.\u00a0 My PST and settings were safely captured with no difficulty.\u00a0 My Documents was populated with everything.\u00a0 I\u2019ve a few other bits\u2019n\u2019bobs in Live Mesh that I\u2019ll recover.\n<\/p>\n
I started messing with the thing on Saturday night \u2013 what an exciting life I lead!\u00a0 Valentines Day is for the weak minded who\u2019ve fallen prey to the greatest marketing ploy ever launched.\n<\/p>\n
The laptop scored a 3.0 in the performance rating.\u00a0 General operations were very quick.\u00a0 Booting up was fast as was sleep\/restore.\u00a0 Windows Media Center was a bit sluggish but this is a beta 1 release and full of bug check code.\u00a0 I like the new gadgets.\u00a0 There\u2019s no sidebar \u2013 you just dock your gadgets on the right side and can control their opacity.\u00a0 Wallpaper was a bit buggy \u2013 sometimes disappearing or going back to it\u2019s original size.\u00a0 Photo rating in Explorer was not as good as in Media Center.\u00a0 I also found I had to refresh explorer manually to reflect things.\u00a0 Media Center seems to rely a lot on indexing so it can go out of whack with Explorer.\n<\/p>\n
Libraries wasn\u2019t as painful as I had expected.\u00a0 A library is a logical view of files from many designated folders.\u00a0 You can specialise a library for documents, music, pictures, etc.\u00a0 Unfortunately, you cannot build other search criteria into a library yet, e.g. \u201cfiles that meet these criteria only\u201d.\u00a0 It would be excellent if they did that.\n<\/p>\n
There\u2019s new functionality called DeviceStage for integrating with devices such as printers, cameras, phones, etc.\u00a0 The list of compatible devices<\/a> is pretty small right now.\u00a0 Hopefully that will increase.\u00a0 Nothing I own was on the list so I haven\u2019t tried it yet.\n<\/p>\n There\u2019s a nice new addition for SOHO\u2019s and homes with a few machines.\u00a0 HomeGroup is like a workgroup with a password.\u00a0 If you set your machine up you can be prompted to set up a HomeGroup and are given a password to print out.\u00a0 You can easily share every document, song or photo on your machine with others on the HomeGroup network.\u00a0 MediaCenter appears to be aware of this.\n<\/p>\n I got back to the house yesterday evening and tried to get online.\u00a0 Here\u2019s where the pain started.\u00a0 I ended up doing a fresh build thanks to the aforementioned screwup of networking thanks to VMware Workstation.\u00a0 My wifi NIC was online and I could scan my network and those of the neighbours.\u00a0 However, no matter what I did, I could not get online.\u00a0 My work machine was fine and my Sony was fine when it ran Vista.\u00a0 I got on the wired network (in the hallway) and IE8 ran fine.\u00a0 I did some googling and found people having the same problem but with no resolution.\n<\/p>\n I decided to use my spare SATA drive and plug it into my work Dell Latitude D530.\u00a0 It was up in no time but it too could not authenticate with my wifi.\u00a0 I tried different wifi settings but no luck.\u00a0 It appears that Windows 7 is incompatible with my Linksys WRT54GS.\n<\/p>\n Doh!\u00a0 Luckily there\u2019s a spare laptop at work that I can use.\u00a0 I\u2019ll run it with Win7 on my wired network in my home office, rebuild my Sony with Vista and I\u2019ve already replaced the Vista drive back into the Dell.\n<\/p>\n EDIT:\n<\/p>\n I finally got my laptop online with Windows 7.\u00a0 I upgraded my firmware (finally worked when I reset the router and used a Vista machine with IE7.\u00a0 Imagine using Vista for resolving compatibility issues!?!?\u00a0 That didn’t fix my wifi problem for Windows 7.\u00a0 I then changed the wireless channel from 13-2.472GHz to 11-2.462GHz.\u00a0 The profile on the Win7 laptop kicked in immediately and I’m now typing this update using my Windows 7 laptop with IE8.\n<\/p>\n EDIT #2:\n<\/p>\n OMG!\u00a0 The battery life on this thing is frackin’ fantastic now.\u00a0 I can get over 3 hours on a full charge using the out-of-the-box "power saver" mode with the wifi on.\u00a0 I wonder how much I might get with a custom "super power saver" mode?\n<\/p>\n I downloaded the beta versions of the new Live stuff.\u00a0 Windows 7 really comes alive when you "complete" it.\u00a0 I also like how fast my laptop is now compared to what it was like with Vista.\u00a0 I wonder how much faster it’ll be like when we get to Release Candidate stage?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I\u2019ve some work coming up where I need to have Windows 7 running on my laptop.\u00a0 I went and bought a spare 250GB SATA drive for the laptop and was ready on Saturday (away from home) to rebuild.\u00a0 I used to own a HP DV9000 but it died (the day before a presentation in the … Continue reading “Installed Windows 7 Beta 1 On My Laptop(s)”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_uf_show_specific_survey":0,"_uf_disable_surveys":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[50],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9428","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-windows-desktop"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t