Windows 7 - great and not so great upgrade experience
- From: Tommy Troll <tom_elam@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sat, 31 Oct 2009 13:43:14 -0700 (PDT)
Well, returned from Europe last week to find my W7 disk in the mail.
So, backed up all the docs and criticals on the USB drive and started
the upgrade. Four hours later it was done. So far so good with the
apps and system stability, BUT...
Getting the upgrade going was a bit of a challenge. W7 checks all the
software to make sure it will run after the upgrade. The installer
refused to start an upgrade until I removed my Canon MP 730 from the
printers list (no W7 driver is available). I also had to remove
Symantec's AV program because it was outdated. The installer also
insisted that I had the very outdated ActiveSync 3 program for an
older iPaq and that too needed to be removed. Never had that software
installed and thus could not remove it. So, after searching around
for an answer I finally decided to install an updated version of the
program. After all that the installer ran through the checks and
started the upgrade.
I left the computer alone for about 3 hours and when I returned it was
ready for my password. The upgrade install was totally unattended, a
first for a Windows upgrade of any kind. After W7 started the first
time I had to adjust the display settings for my 21" LG monitor and
ran Windows update. The update loaded a few drivers and that was it.
I spent a few hours poking around and playing with settings, but had
to change nothing major.
I removed the Mobile Device Center that was installed to get around
the Active Sync issue. For AV protection I grabbed a free copy of the
new Microsoft package. Finally, when I plugged in my Canon MP 730 to
a USB port the driver re-installed and it works just fine, thank you
very much.
HP has not issued the full W7 driver set for this machine, but
everything works EXCEPT my Ethernet connection. So for now I am
having to use WiFi. Not an major issue at this point, but wish it was
not so.
Also, I have a Belkin wireless WiFi printer router that now will not
connect to either printer that it controls on this machine. It is
still working for the wife's XP machine. This too is a driver issue.
If Belkin does not issue a W7 driver pretty soon I'll have to replace
that equipment.
The OS itself is working great. It seems a little quicker than Vista.
Verifying that impression, my User Experience score went from 2.8 to
3.2. The Nvidia graphics hardware is the constraint, but then again
this is almost an entry level machine.
Somehow I picked up 6 gigs of free space on the main hard drive
partition. Also, since I cannot use the Vista recovery partition (the
D: drive partition) I formatted it and picked up another 6 gigs of
available space. Not a major item, but it does validate that W7 is
more compact than Vista.
Startup and shutdown times seem a little faster, but I have not put a
stopwatch to them.
Other than the driver issues (and those will likely be solved in time)
it has been a pretty good experience. The new taskbar and task
switcher are a nice change. Controls also seem to be laid out better
and items are easier to find. But what is REALLY amazing is that all
the software works. I have one program on here that dates all the way
back to 1994 and Win 3.11, and it runs perfectly. Bet you can't say
that about much Mac software!
.
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