I recently installed a new hard drive on my computer at work and installed the final version of Windows 7 Ultimate. Let me inform you how the install went and any problems I encountered.
First this was a clean install on a new hard drive. I also used the final RTM version of Windows 7 Ultimate (I have a MSDN Subscription) and the 64 bit version on an HP hw8600 Workstation. The computer has a quad processor running at 3 GHz. It also has 8 Gigs of RAM and a 1.5 Terabyte 10,000 RMP hard drive. The computer itself is about 7 months old and I previously had installed Windows Vista 32 bit Ultimate. Vista x32 was a dog on the computer and I was getting to hate the computer because it was so slow. At times it would take almost 30 minutes for Visual Studio to load up my website project.
Anyway, along with the install. Installing Windows 7 Ultimate x64 as a new install went pretty smooth. The complete process took about 30 minutes. What really surprised me was the fact that I didn’t need any x64 bit drivers for the HP computer but again it is a fairly new computer being only 7 months old.
After the final boot Windows 7 seems to be running just fine. However, I did have several problems. First my Microsoft Live Mesh x64 would not install. Google Chrome and Google Gears would not install. I could not get my Xerox N32 Work center printer nor my HP DeskJet 990 CXi printer to work. Also my Epson scanner would not work. I kind of expected the scanner not to work but the printers not working was a real problem.
After doing some research on the problem with Live Mesh not installing I found out that I should do an update of the computer. So I started the Windows Update and and it said that I need about 80 updates. Waited over an hour and Windows Update said it had downloaded 0%. Well it was the end of my workday so I decided to leave the computer running and downloading the windows updates.
The next morning windows update said it had finished downloading and installing the updates and that I needed to reboot my computer. So I rebooted my computer and to my surprise, both of my printers were working again. I was also able to install Windows Live Mesh x64 and I was a happy puppy.
My scanner would not work, Epson won’t update their older scanners with 64 bit drivers. So I have a second Windows XP Professional computer running 32 bit so I installed the Epson scanner on the XP Pro computer and it is working again.
I also had several applications that would not work in Windows 7 RC but now they do in the final version of Windows 7.
So now I have Windows 7 Ultimate 64 bit installed and I am very happy! Programs run much faster including Visual Studio 2008. Not it loads my complete website project in only a few minutes. If you are running Vista on your computer then I highly recommend that you upgrade to Windows 7. There were many features of Vista that I hated and Windows 7 had fixed most if not all of them for me.
My next blog post will be my install of Windows 7 Ultimate x64 as and upgrade of Windows 7 Ultimate x64 RC. Stay tuned.
Jerry J. Jansen
jsdigitalsales.com
qualitybinocular.com
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