Windows 7 Install
I wanted to share with you my experience with Windows 7 so far.
This is my 3.5 yr old DELL Precision 370 3.2GHv proc / 2GB RAM / RAID 0 nothing else fancy in it.
So I tackled this , what I thought would be an upgrade last week, I put the DVD in, ran the compatibility checker , showed me I was clean. It did tell me to de authorize ITunes.
I put the DVD in and it asked if you want to upgrade to do it fresh. I choose upgrade. It then runs thru a number of information gathering tasks , setting gathering etc…
After 1.5 hours of gathering it’s ready to reach the next stage to install, at that point I reached an error point “Could not update the boot file” no matter what I did from BIOS changes to looking up the error and making registry changes made a difference.
So with that I got discouraged after 2 evenings of messing with it and decided to wipe and go fresh. Hooked up my USB HDD and grabbed all my stuff.
Note “ I still would like to see a real upgrade work”
Next, dropped in the DVD and booted off it.
I now noticed it doesn’t say Press here to boot from CD and the “Checking your computer …..” dialog is gone. What appears is the white text bar at the bottom of the screen that is loading pre files.
It came back to the same window I received when I tried to upgrade. I had the choice of upgrade or new install. I went with new install. It did look for old versions of windows and told me there was one there. It said something like overwrite it. It never asked me to format the drive.
It then goes into one screen with 5 tasks and after each task is done it places a checkmark when done.
First it loads the files
Then expands them
Then it loads them on
Then it prepare the system
During this I got like a box or 3 asking for time zone and that stuff.
Then it reboots and says preparing to run windows for the first time.
Then it boots in to a cool animated Windows logo, then right into the login screen,
I logged in and Boom to my surprise every driver was in and loaded, my USB stick that I had prepared with drivers was now a brick. Everything worked. All I had to do was swap the sound driver.
My older HP LaserJet 1150 just needed the Universal print driver loaded again
My legacy apps worked just fine, I have a Serial to USB cable with a program to load frequencies into my handheld police scanner and that app loaded and worked with no issues.
My Roxio 10 suite worked perfect
Vipre loaded great
After that I restored my data, during that process after I got back 95% of my stuff my external HDD threw a bearing and seized up. So I installed our Remote Backup and pulled 200MB in 5 min flat!!!
Grabbed all my other would be lost data and got it all clean!
Now the install of apps was straight forward and you have to adjust the UAC to a lower setting.
I find this version much quicker. On Vista with this Box I was running 70% RAM usage on Windows 7 I run 39%
I do find allot of the annoying lags are gone
The Classic Start menu is gone forever
The way you pin things to the start menu or task bar is neat
Many of the settings are buried and hard to find, but they are there.
They now want you to type everything into the search bar when you click on Start. Like to get to “RUN” or “CMD” you type it in there and up it comes.
My PC also is not indexing all the time which was the case before, it seemed the hard drives never stopped thrashing, now they are quiet as a mouse.
This upgrade will be well worth it and most likely will be adopted quickly. We are going to have to get you guys trained up on how to use this and we have to learn how to image this too…
I have not loaded Bomgar yet and I have not done a bunch of MSP stuff yet but so far everything works.
-Mark Tango, VP of Operations at Corporate IT Solutions