James Friesen's Tech Blog

Windows 7 Release – Installation notes

By admin, October 24, 2009 16:06

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For those that have been following me since January of this year you may be aware that I took advantage of downloading the open beta version and testing it on a few machines.

I had really good luck with various systems and even installing it in VMware. My only real hangup was my main gaming rig which runs Windows XP SP3, simply refused to detect the DVD drive. Which was very strange since it was booting and running the setup from the very same drive. All the VMware machine I build used the same drive also although I’m aware VMware does use it’s own drivers but that was it. Every other box, method I tried worked without major problem

Today Saturday Oct 24, 2009 I took the liberty of installing both Windows 7 Ultimate x64 AND Ubuntu Desktop 9.10 Karmic Koala Release Candidate x64 on the exact same laptop a Compaq presario CQ60 laptop which came with Vista Home Basic which I really did not want. If you want to find out about my Installation for Ubuntu check out the next story. I’m publishing this one first so it should be the one right after or the newer one.

As I mentioned earlier I’ve been playing with Windows 7 for many months and testing it out, back in June I decided to try it on a production box that I use for a ‘media server’ and my main chat box. This worked very well and has still performed very well. This was a i386 or x86 version as opposed to the x64 version since the CPU doesn’t support that version it still worked great. Given this was the 7100 evaluation version I did expect and have a few crashes, but surprisingly only one kernel crash. The rest were application crashes.

What pleased me greatly was the fact that nearly all my applications were usable without having to ‘buy’ or get newer versions with the exception of Nero. But in fairness I was using a pretty old version 6.something, so I decided it was time to get version 9 anyways.

However I was so pleased with the evaluation version of Windows 7 and I plan to use it until it expires, I wanted to get rid of Vista and put 7 on this PC. However it did not qualify for the free upgrade since it was only home basic I was out buying it retail and the price was not going to break me I went ahead and got Ultimate.

So here without further adieu is my installation notes for ‘Installing Windows 7 x64′.

10:50am: Booted compaq from setup dvd.

10:51am: Wiped out original partitions on Hard Disk EXCEPT the OEM recovery (even though I made DVD’s I still wanted to have a BIOS method that was quick and painless)

10:52am: Repartitioned hard disk and the setup quick formatted the new partitions. This also created a system partition for it’s own purpose which is not up at boot time, but can be seen easily from any partition tool.

11:08am: The first reboot. Actually I was expecting more, but it was the only one needed before it completed and then ran Windows Update.

11:15am: Completed Install. System now operational and working with only TWO minor issues.

The Coprocessor did not find/install a driver and is showing as broken in “Device Manager”, and
The Video drivers (nVidia 8800 M card) were not installed, but system running on “Generic VGA Driver”.

So after this was done I decided to do a Windows Update, which then installed a few updates, which surprisingly included my Video Drivers. So after the reboot my desktop looked ‘much’ nicer. I had to go to the nVidia web site to get the nForce drivers to fix the coprocessor problem, and updated all the other drivers for the various nForce chipset hardware.

I quickly loaded IE8 to get Firefox 3.5 installed and this was not too painful. I also installed ‘Foxit’ PDF reader and 7-zip archiver as these will be the most used utilities I will use on this system.

So, by 11:38am I had done my first update, fixed the couple issues so now all the devices are properly working, and got my top 3 programs installed, and then run another Windows Update to install the rest of the needed updates. 25 minutes to do the install, and 21 minutes to do the updates, reboots and install my needed tools. I still have more software to install on this to get it worthy of production, but at this stage I’m quite happy to say that Windows 7 is now working great.

I considered taking some pictures of the operation and including them, but at this point I’ll probably not bother.

Lastly the “Performance Ranking” for the laptop dropped slightly. With Vista Basic Home it was rated 4.0, with Windows 7 Ultimate it’s rated 3.9 so I cannot really tell the difference but I was expecting it to drop anyways.

Overall, the fresh install was quick and painless, an added benefit was losing all the ‘bundled crap’ that HP provided with it’s install on Vista, so for now I’m quite satisfied that this laptop will have a decent modern version of Windows.