I just completed my fifth installation of Windows 7 over that past week and thought I would document my experience here. I ran into a couple of surprising things that I thought others might also be seeing. The bottom line…all five installed and are up and running. Here is a little more detail regarding each installation:
- Oct 22 – First installation was a full installation of Windows Home Premium on an HP DV8235NR laptop. The installation went extremely well and there were no issues. Following installation, I reinstalled some applications and devices and again, no issues.
- Oct 23 -The second installation was an in-place upgrade on a Dell desktop computer using the Windows Home Premium upgrade edition. Again, I had absolutely no issues at all. The in-place upgrades do take somewhat longer to install. I know all the “experts” advise against doing an in-place upgrade, but I have had no problems. Although I was not having an issue with my all-in-one printer, I did learn later than HP had released updated drivers which I went ahead and installed.
- Oct 23 – Two for two…I’m on a roll! The third installation was another in-place upgrade on a Dell XPS M1710 laptop using the Windows Ultimate upgrade. I received an alert indicating that the Intel wireless and Microsoft mouse drivers were not compatible and recommended that they be uninstalled before continuing. I was a little surprised at this since the upgrade advisor had not indicated there were any issues. Anyway, I uninstalled the two items and then continued with the Windows 7 installation. Again, all went well. Prior to the installation of Windows 7, I was unable to hear music that I added when creating a movie in the new Windows Live Movie Maker. The installation fixed this issue and it is now working as it should. One of the updates was a reinstallation of the Microsoft mouse drivers. I did have to reinstall the original sound drivers as well as the touch pad software from Dell, but that certainly wasn’t a problem…..wow….three for three….do I dare go for four?
- Oct 24 – Sure, why not? The fourth installation was a custom install on a Dell XPS M1710 laptop using the Windows Ultimate upgrade. All began well, and I was on about the third step of the installation and received the dreaded “blue screen”! Needless to say, I had some unkind things to say at that moment, but before I could react, the installation notified me that it was rolling back all the changes. I thought to myself….”isn’t this just wonderful….I guess I’ll be back where I started”. After it rolled back the changes, it began the installation process again. This time when it reached the same point, instead of displaying the “blue screen”, it indicated there were some hard drive issues and that it was going to run the old DOS CHKDSK command. This took quite a while, and while it didn’t find any bad sectors, there were apparently some security pointers that were not in the proper location. It notified my that it had fixed them, and then the Windows 7 installation continued from where it had stopped. This time it completed successfully, and the machine is up and running. Just to be on the safe side, I ran the SpinRite application which performs a low-level disk format. It reported no errors. On this particular machine, prior to the installation of Windows 7, I was unable to download anything from the Zune Marketplace. The installation fixed that problem. Needless to say, this installation took just about the entire day, so decided to take a break before installation number 5.
- Oct 30 – Since Microsoft made available a means of installing Windows 7 on a netbook by using a USB drive, that was my fifth installation. Downloaded the ISO file for Windows Home Premium upgrade from the Microsoft Store as well as the application to install the ISO file on a USB drive. Since the machine has Windows XP, I had to do a custom installation. The installation from the USB drive went extremely well. When I was asked to enter the registration key, I did so, and clicked Next, and…..nothing happened! I let it go for several minutes and still nothing. I forced the machine to shut down. When it restarted, it picked right up at the same screen. This time, I unchecked the option to, “register automatically when on-line”. I clicked on Next, and again…nothing. I let it go for a couple of minutes and it finally moved ahead and completed the installation. I was a little concerned as to if it would allow me to activate the installation, but it activated just fine and everything is working great. In fact, the machine, particularly the video drivers are working much better than they had before the Windows 7 installation.
So that’s my saga of my experiences installing Windows 7. The bottom line is that all five machines are operating better than they had in the past, and the few issues that I was having prior to the installation seem to be fixed. Windows 7 is an awesome OS. Congratulations Microsoft…you nailed it!
Filed under: Windows 7
