I’m running on a 2007 “Santa Rosa” MacBook Pro 17”, bootcamped for XP.  I’ve been using XP for years, skipped vista, and until recently had no reason to upgrade.  After googling around, and seeing some really slick new features, and also with some recommendations from tech-savvy friends (you can’t beat “I like it more than XP”), I decided to try it out.  After backing up all my files, I burned the downloadable enterprise trial .iso to a DVD using InfraRecorder.  Booted from the DVD, and I was off into the world of W7.

Installation was pretty standard, I installed it overwriting my XP partition, took roughly an hour and a half.  Bootcamp drivers from my Mac OSX Leopard disc, despite being riddled with warnings from w7 that they were incompatible, seemed to work fine.  That’s when I encountered the 1st problem, sound.  The only driver that isn’t working on the MBP is the realtek audio drivers; however this was remedied by downloading new drivers from the realtek site, linked here.

Once downloaded and installed (took awhile, they only gave me about 15kb/s), the sound started working immediately.  However, I noticed windows doesn’t remember my volume settings anymore when I plug/unplug my headphones. I’ll try to fix this later, but I’m not too concerned about it.

Once the sound issue was taken care of, I started to install my apps.  Immediately I found a problem:  a lot of my applications are stored on .ISO’s, and DAEMON Tools/Alcohol 120% are both incompatible with W7!  So off I was to find a replacement.  After a short bit of googling, I found this.  Its free, its quick, and most importantly, it works.

Now that I had working drive emulation, I got down to installing.  To my surprise, almost 100% of my applications installed and ran perfectly!  The only exception was SetPoint (had to get a w7 version, but luckily it was still compatible with UberOptions).  Also, as a note, Skype was reported numerous times as having known compatibility issues, but worked fine.

Now I’ve got my machine set up just how I want it, and will be attempting to make a backup image using windows 7’s built in recovery system.  So far I have nothing to complain about for windows 7, and a lot of cool new features that I really enjoy.  I’m very excited to continue exploring what seems to be a very promising OS.

I recently came across the following article. If you have automatic updates configured and/or are running as local administrator, you probably didn't notice it.

Article ID: 970789 - A folder that is created under the root of the system drive is missing entries in its security descriptor, which may cause some application failures on the English version of Windows 7 Release Candidate 32-bit Ultimate

"In the English version of Windows 7 Release Candidate (build 7100) 32-bit Ultimate, the folder that is created as the root folder of the system drive (%SystemDrive%) is missing entries in its security descriptor. One effect of this problem is that standard users such as non-administrators cannot perform all operations to subfolders that are created directly under the root. Therefore, applications that reference folders under the root may not install successfully or may not uninstall successfully. Additionally, operations or applications that reference these folders may fail."

"For example, if a folder is created under the root of the system drive from an elevated command prompt, this folder will not correctly inherit permissions from the root of the drive. Therefore, some specific operations, such as deleting the folder, will fail when they are performed from a non-elevated command prompt. Additionally, the following error message appears when the operation fails: "

 

"Furthermore, the missing security descriptor entries protect non-admin file operations directly under the root. "

You can find the full description at http://support.microsoft.com/kb/970789. All in all, no big deal.

One of my complaints since upgrading to Win7 has been the 4-5 minute boot time I was experiencing on my ThinkPad X60. I spent some time over the last couple days analyzing the boot process and tried some “old standard” remedies.

Updating my BIOS did nothing (I didn’t really expect it to). Using MSCONFIG to turn off a bunch of startup services and running a full SpyBot scan gave me back about 15 seconds – not enough by a long shot. Clearing the C:\WINDOWS\PREFETCH folder and then rebooting to rebuild the contents shaved another 24 seconds, but it was still taking nearly 4 minutes for my laptop to be usable from power on.

Then I came across an article on MaximumPC.com (http://tinyurl.com/purifylt) about how to clean bloatware off of a new laptop. In the article, the author discusses PC Decrapifier, an application that is now a part of my standard toolbox. After removing a bunch of underused and unneeded apps (which I probably could have done from add/remove programs, but PC Decrapifier does it en masse) my overall boot time dropped below 2:30 – much better.

So, the root cause of my slow boot in Win7 stemmed from my collecting stuff over the past two and a half years. Moral of the story: uninstall the stuff you don’t need before upgrading or do a clean install of Windows 7.

By the way, MaximumPC has a great How-To on dual-booting Windows 7 RC (http://tinyurl.com/w7dualboot).

--Jim

After installing Windows 7 RC over Vista on my everyday system, I am really missing quick launch and it doesn’t show up as an option to add to the taskbar.

Turn on Quick Launch

1.       Right click on the empty space on the task bar and then pick Toolbars > New Toolbar…

    

2.       In the New Toolbar – Choose a Folder dialog box, browse to: C:\Users\%userprofile%\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Internet Explorer

3.       Highlight Quick Launch and click the Select Folder button.

4.       The Quick Launch button will appear on the right side of the Taskbar in (IMHO) the wrong spot.

5.       To move it to the left side of the Taskbar, left-click on the dotted lines of the pinned taskbar programs (unlock the taskbar if you don’t see them) and drag the pinned taskbar programs to the right of your new Quick Launch toolbar and release. You can now adjust the size of the pinned taskbar programs.

6.       To remove the Quick Launch Toolbar text, right click on the Quick Launch toolbar title name, and then uncheck the Show Text and Show Title items.

All fixed:   

7.       Now, if you want to, unpin IE and Media Player from the taskbar by right clicking them and choosing unpin.

My first installation of Windows 7 was on a virtual PC running in Vista on my desktop machine. It took quite a while – I let it run overnight – and once it was done, the VM ran pretty well. I then installed the Windows 7 January Beta with Office 2007 already installed (available to MS Partners) on a Dell Latitude D600 with 1GB of RAM. That install went about the same as the VM install. Then I wanted to lay the RC on top of that install only to find out that MS never intended the RC to upgrade earlier Beta releases.  So once I figured out that workaround (see http://www.windows7lab.com/faq.html), I was off and running.

Running a new OS on a clean, non-production machine is one thing – even if it does only receive a 1.0 Windows Experience Index Rating – using it daily is another, so four days ago, I decided to jump in with both feet. After backing up my daily use laptop, a ThinkPad X60 with 4GB RAM, I inserted the Windows 7 RC disc and launched the upgrade. 3 hours later I had my new Windows 7 laptop. The process was pretty hands off, but to say I was unimpressed with the time it took to upgrade is an understatement. I have been running Vista on this machine for nearly three years and I know it is pretty junked up so I suppose I should be happy the upgrade worked at all.

So far, I am reasonably happy with Windows 7. Other than the crazy long boot times I have run in to, the OS is pretty snappy and nothing has failed to run yet. I will be digging into speeding up the boot process this weekend.

I’d love to hear about your installation experiences, so feel free to email me your comments and questions.

--Jim

Welcome to Windows7lab’s blog!  With all of the buzz around Windows 7 we’re starting to receive more and more questions so stay tuned for frequent posts from our team.  First, let’s start from the beginning so we can set the stage for the remaining posts as we dig into our findings.

The most popular question we receive is…  “Why is Windows 7 better than XP and Vista?”

Windows 7 has addressed many of the issues that were experienced with Windows Vista.  Overall, our experience and associated feedback with both the Beta release and the RC release have been very positive including:

• Windows 7 startup, shutdown, suspend and resume times have been drastically reduced.  Previous hardware requirements for an acceptable performance have been reduced (meaning that Windows 7 can run with acceptable performance on “lesser” hardware and will be more compatible with existing hardware without the need for substantial upgrades)
• Windows 7 is more compatible with both hardware and software (and even allows incompatible software to run in a virtual XP environment – see below)
• Windows 7 has enhanced the power management features from Windows Vista (which had improved them from XP) and also provided a battery efficiency report that details current usage of battery power by device.  Much of the power management improvements were smarter usage of background management (which increases battery life by decreasing power usage of processor(s), turning off unused devices). 
• Windows 7 is more secure than Windows XP (both from external attacks and configuration issues)
• The User Account Control feature has been revised to be less intrusive (fewer prompts and dialog boxes) to the end user while still providing the same level of protection.
• For a small business user, Windows 7’s simplified configuration of workgroup networking allows small businesses to increase their security controls of data without requiring much technical knowledge)

In addition to all the performance enhancements of Windows 7, there is one new feature that has great implications for business users.  The XP Mode of Windows 7 allows XP supported applications to run in a native XP environment on a Windows 7 machine (transparent to the end user).    This feature does have some implications but does allow businesses to quickly adopt Windows 7 while supporting their current applications (and migrating them to a native Windows 7 environment).  Some of the implications are:

• XP Mode requires that the machine CPU is capable of hardware virtualization using either Intel Virtualization Technology (VT) for Intel chips or AMD-V for AMD chips (can easily be verified with your hardware manufacturer for your model(s).
• The XP Mode is actually utilizing Windows Virtual PC and a fully licensed XP SP3 machine (this full license is available with the following editions of Windows 7 – Professional, Enterprise, and Ultimate).  Therefore, the XP virtual machine is actually running inside Windows 7 (requiring more memory and processor capability).

Another benefit (just announced from Microsoft) is that businesses who currently purchase Vista Business with Software Assurance are allowed to upgrade to Windows 7 for no cost.