Windows 7, Welcome….

Although I had put the RC on an old machine at home, I’ve been waiting to get the RTM internally here at Company Net.

It finally happened and I’m now all Win7’d-Up. The upgrade from Vista to Win 7 Enterprise x64 was a painless if slightly slow process. A couple of apps flagged as “might not work properly after the upgrade”. No sweat. Had to a couple of reboots to finalise the process but no problems.

Note for Vista Windows Mobile Device Centre users – it doesn’t work so uninstall it, connect your mobile device and hey presto, the new version downloads, installs and you’re off and running.

Next Steps – BitLocker(maybe) but definitely Office 2010 tech preview (32-bit not 64 as this bit me last time I tried it). Then, get setup to boot from a VHD as an option to my hard disk – details from James O’Neill’s Blog.

Win7 Fun and Games, BCD and VHDs….

Hands-up, this is a depth of working on Win7 and 2008 R2 which I do not expect to explore. However, I can appreciate how useful this post from James O’Neill is, so I thought it worth linking here.

Booting from VHD (and some gotcha’s) will be a useful feature for all sorts of reasons. If you read that post and think “Oooh, that sound like a bit of a wheeze, I could try that” then YOYO and perhaps you should probably wait for his explanatory video?

Welcome, New Friend…

Well, I just upgraded an old Toshiba Satellite A30 to Windows 7 RC. Very painless, straightforward – just what you would expect from Microsoft nowadays.

Several blogs have alluded to the comprehensive support for devices so I had high expectations and was very relaxed in approaching the install. Maybe too relaxed.

All went well and bingo – there was new-Windows. Except that I had no connectivity. Hhrumph…..of course – I had done the install while connected wirelessly – with an old Belkin 54g PCMCIA Notebook wireless card. Had I really expected New-Windows to notice this and to have the insight and preparedness to have the required drivers? Well yes, I had, but not consciously – I just hadn’t thought about it.

Feeling rather foolish, I did dig out the original disk, installed the required magic and hey-tesco, there was the network.

New-windows had also not picked the audio (RealTech AC97 – no default was used or offered) or the video (Intel(R) 82852/82855 GM/GME Graphics Controller – some MSFT default was clearly working OK).

So – looking forward to enjoying the new experience – see what’s in the tin, under the hood. I hope there’s something interesting.