Maximumpc

© 2009 John C. Dvorak Cage Match

I have been sick lately but today I received my Windows 7 party pack via UPS and after I break out the camera I am going to start a thread here keeping track of my experience with both the party and Windows 7 itself. For now I am going to say that I will be installing it on my laptop which the specs can be found at http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/document?docname=c00852652&cc=us&dlc=en&lc=en&jumpid=reg_R1002_USEN For now I am heading to bed but this weekend after I back up my software I shall begin my journey down the Windows 7 path!

POOR THING, IS IT CONTAGIOUS??

You shoudl have put this in the Humor section..

Everyone in the office caught it and got over it in days while I went from a sinus infection to walking pneumonia so I am taking it easy over the long weekend and figured this would be a fun little project. We shall see if this will be a comedy or not this weekend...

THERE ARE NO PROVEN PRODUCTS...
And Im not a beta tester..

I just finished installing Windows 7 which took about 20 minutes to install despite my DVD having issues which is an HP issue since it has been replaced once already. It felt like the MS Easy Transfer took longer than the install itself. After the install Windows loaded in less than a minute and I was greeted by an all familiar generic 800x600 display which looks horrible on a laptop. I ran Windows Update and it found the drivers I needed and after about 3 minutes of downloads and installs I once again rebooted.

The Windows load time is very fast now especially since I did a format on the drive for a clean install however keep in mind that this is Win7 Ultimate Signature Edition so I am not sure how the upgrade works on a boxed copy. Overall the system seems much faster and my next post will be after I re-install all of my software and settings so stay tuned.

Other than my work issued copy of Norton I have all of my software re-installed and have to say I have some gripes but this feels like Vista with a new look. The Easy Transfer worked like a charm and after a few minutes my desktop was restored minus some shortcuts to programs were not installed but my Outlook was exactly as I had left it after installing it again. I opened Outlook expecting to have to redirect it to my profile etc but it opened and voila there was my e-mail all waiting for me.

The boot time seems quicker as does the restore from sleep but the overall feel of the system doesn't feel different to me other than the taskbar. The old alerts are no longer as prominent and when I run something that requires my attention it flashes a small shield down on the taskbar and pops up like an old fashion dialog box. Overall I am happy but I doubt I would feel this was as urgent an upgrade since I was happy with Vista since Beta despite driver issues with my Foxconn motherboard that just resulted in my refusal to ever buy a board from them again.

My suggestion is that if you are happy with Vista stick with it however if you have a laptop like mine then it might be worth a look for the power consumption they boast about. In honor with John's prediction I will take a look at this post in say 6 months and see if I feel the same after a few dozen Patch Tuesdays.

Yesterday (Saturday) I dashed down to my local supermarket and picked up a copy of Windows 7 Ultimate, having become utterly sick of Vista and its idiosyncrasies. Since my working computer (Dell XPS, Intel Quad Core) is only just over a month old and I still haven't had time to copy over much stuff from my old XP box, I decided to install 64-bit Win 7 as an upgrade rather than a clean install. I'd read horror stories that this could take up to 20 hours but in my case it took just under two. I did of course backup all important stuff onto an external hard drive beforehand, just in case.

The install went smoothly and as far as I have been able to tell so far, nothing was lost in the process. All my previous settings were retained except, curiously, the desktop background: I like solid black so I can see the icons more clearly and Win 7 changed this to blue.

All programs seem to work fine except for Dragon Natural Speaking which had to be reinstalled for some reason. The overall impression is that everything works somewhat faster, although Vista was no slouch. The display driver seems to have been updated and operations like dragging windows across the screen do seem smoother.

Start-up and shutdown are marginally faster (Vista sometimes simply refused to shut down, leaving me with no option but to power the box down manually). So far, all seems well.

Out of curiosity I downloaded the 64-bit version of Firefox, oddly named Shiretoko, and this does indeed seem noticeably faster than the 32-bit version although of course it's difficult to tell since browser loading speed depends on other factors such as connection speed, speed of the server at the other end, etc. However, for some pages it wants me to install Adobe Flash Player 10.0.32, which I did but to no apparent effect -- it still insists I have to install it even though it's installed. I'll go back to the 32-bit version until they get that sorted out.

I'm not entirely sure what advantages Ultimate has over the Professional version, other than Professional not being available in my supermarket. The box shows a comparison of the three versions in which only two of the features available with Ultimate aren't available with Professional: data protection with "BitLocker" and the ability to change the system language to "any of the 35 available languages." Neither of these are of particular interest to me but maybe there are some other advantages that I haven't yet discovered.

The GUI is different mostly so that they could achieve the snap to windows which is when you drag a window to the edge it "snaps" to the side so that you can have side-by-side windows. When I did my clean install it installed a March driver version for mine. I wasn't aware of the 64bit version of Firefox which I will go grab later. I don't know why the background wasn't saved other than the new GUI may have opted out of it due to some code forcing you to set it back up. The difference between Pro and Ultimate is bit locker, the languages and other buisness things such as policies etc... basically Ultimate is pro with all of the buisness features but pro does have XP mode which is what most people will want.

Most of my XP programs work fine. A couple needed to be set to XP compatibility, after which they ran perfectly, as in fact they did with Vista 64. So far, the only problem I've found is with the 64-bit version of Logitech Setpoint (to configure my keyboard and trackerball). This refused to install with Vista and still refuses with Win 7.

Are you using the XP mode or just compatibility? XP mode is just virual PC inegrated into the OS which gives the program a sandbox to run in but you supposedly can't tell. I still need to install it on my laptop and try it out. I bet if I tried to install 7 on my home built PC I doubt that Foxconn will support 7 any more than Vista which they refused to update drivers for 64 bit which is why the unit is gathering dust... I never understand why hardware makers refuse to update hardware that high end users who pay a lot of money buy when they know those people will keep their systems more up to date than boxed users.

I'm using XP compatibility, which works fine. I seem to recall reading somewhere that the XP mode is a separate (free) download, but I haven't had time to investigate further.

Yep it is a seperate download which I downloaded last night and installed XP mode today. Basically it creates a 1.6GB virtual drive and now I just have to install Virtual PC when I am not too busy fixing my mother's computer... I hope to get it setup tonight and post my opinion tomorrow.