Windows 7

I too have a long weekend as Monday is a bank holiday here in the UK. I decided to tinker with my computer today as tinkering is what I enjoy doing, but I’ve not done very much of it recently.  I read about the features of Microsoft’s new operating system, Windows 7, and how the RC (release candidate) version is available for anyone to download and use.  Normally they are buggy and have features intentionally left out, but the review I was reading indicated that this was not the case for Windows 7, so I thought I would give it a try.

I use Windows XP, and have never used Vista as I am happy enough with XP so didn’t see the point of spending money to upgrade until I get a new computer.  Windows 7 RC will install over Vista, but won’t install over XP, so I had to do a clean install.  I didn’t want to lose my files, so I decided to partition my hard drive and install Windows 7 as a second operating System on my pc.  I had a quick look online to see if this could be done easily, and it could, I just needed to have at least 16Gb of space on the new partition.

I downloaded the 64bit version of Windows 7 as I have a 64bit CPU (which has never run a 64bit operating system, so I was interested to see if I noticed any difference). The download is just over 3Gb which is huge.  It is an ISO file which needs to be burned to a DVD, which is then used as a boot up disc.  Everything ran smoothly, with the whole process taking about 3 hours, although half of that time was spent defragging my hard drive before I created the partition.  Once it had fully installed I had a play to see what new features there were.  Unfortunately I couldn’t connect to the internet, and that was due to Windows 7 not finding a device driver for the network adapter on my motherboard.  After restarting the computer to boot back into XP, I found an updated driver which i downloaded and saved in my partitioned drive, and installed once I booted into Windows 7 again.  This worked fine, and once online it automatically found updated drivers for my other devices.

The release candidate of Windows 7 will expire in about 12 months.  So far I like it a lot so I will probably use it as my main operating system. I’m writing this blog entry using Windows Live Writer, which is part of the Windows Live suite of programs, and is designed to offer useful tools to blog writers.  I’ll let you know how useful it is next time I blog.

Sorry this is a tech-heavy post, but I’m quite pleased with myself about still having a decent amount of computer knowledge, and about being brave enough to take the plunge with something like this.