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Windows 7 – Fresh Installation

December 2, 2009 by Wayne Small Leave a Comment

Our family has a number of laptop computers, with each member having their own. My wife and son both wanted to have Windows 7 on their laptops, but my daughter however wants to stick with Windows Vista. For now I’ll let her so stay on Vista as she’s got the right to make up her own mind what she wants.

My wife’s laptop is a HP 6910p. We had been running Windows Vista x64 Business on it for some time, but have had so many issues with it as there is a definite bug in the video driver for that laptop. The bug manifests itself when the laptop goes into its’ power saving mode and switches off the screen, it then has a Blue Screen Of Death (BSOD). The problem is that you can’t see the BSOD as the video driver has turned off the LCD. We’ve raised it with HP and they’ve given us the right royal run around asking us to reinstall Vista twice, and then downgrade to Vista x86. None of this has worked. So some months back I decided to install Win7 beta on it to see how it went – and it’s not missed a beat since then! Anyway – long story short – now it is time to move to the Windows 7 RTM version. I decided that the best approach was to format and install to an empty hard drive. I gave the DVD to my wife and stood back as she wanted to do the install. Less than an hour later, Windows 7 was up and running on it without any major issues. Performed a Windows Update and it brought down all the latest drivers for the accessories such as the fingerprint scanner. The machine works very fast and she is very happy with it. Likewise I’m happy to say that we’ve not seen ANY BSOD with it either.  We joined this one to the domain as my wife does do a fair bit of accounts and administration work and I wanted to be sure to give her full access to everything she needs.

My son’s laptop is a 3 year old Toshiba Satellite Prot A100. He’s not exactly a power user, but does use it for his primary school homework, playing games and surfing the net. He has been using a Toshiba Portege M200 which died a few weeks back, so this is his “new” laptop that has been sitting on the shelf for some time. It had Windows XP Professional on it, but we didn’t care too much about that and decided that a complete wipe and install was the way to go. The laptop has 2GB RAM and a 60GB hard drive. My son wanted to do the install of Windows 7 himself, so I figured let him try it – he can only learn. I expected problems, but he booted from the Windows 7 DVD and just over an hour later had a fully functioning laptop connected via our wireless network to the net. Woohoo. Ok – so I checked Device Manager and found only two “Other devices” that didn’t have drivers. Given everything seemed to be working fine we decided to leave it at that. My son’s laptop was connected just to our Windows Home Server so it’s backed up on a regular basis and he has a place he can store his files, access family photos, movies and so on.

All in all, we were all very impressed with how easily and quickly our installations went through on both new and old hardware. Now let’s see how the next few weeks go as they get stuck into using them for real world use.

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Filed Under: Blog Tagged With: Installation, Windows 7

About The Author

Wayne has been working with Microsoft Server products in the SMB market for over 20 years. He has a passion for technology and been a Microsoft MVP for over 15 years. Read More…

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