Random Rants & Raves

I finished downloading the Windows 7 RC1 64-bit version yesterday. I was running the beta of Win7 with a dual boot of Windows Vista. I planned to wipe off Vista from my machine and use the larger partition for the RC. So I quickly popped in a blank DVD-R and burnt the ISO at max speed to the DVD.

Next, I rebooted the machine, chose to start from the DVD and started the Win7RC setup. The setup went fine till the point where it expanded the OS files. It got stuck at 50% for about 20 minutes and then died! With a horrible feeling I tried this again and the same thing happened. Tried rebooting the system from the hard disk and it have me a message of Boot Manager missing. Now approaching something close to panic – I have a Windows 7 App Compat workshop in Pune starting early Monday morning – I booted off the DVD again and chose repair automatically. Although the repair found my Win7 beta, on rebooting I still got the error message.

So yet again I booted off the DVD and this time did a manual repair and chose Repair Startup Problems. After performing some tasks, it finally rebooted and I was able to boot back into the Win7 Beta that was on my machine. I quickly copied the ISO off to an external drive and then wrote two copies of the DVD at the slowest speed possible. TIP: To ensure no data errors on DVDs with highly compressed data such as an OS install, ensure you do this – write at the slowest speed of your DVD burner. This was something I’ve always known but ignored due to the wanting to install the RC quickly.

Anyway, tried with the new DVD and I had the Win7 RC on my machine in about 20 minutes. Configured my personal settings and I was booted into the desktop. The setup had found all my devices other than the driver for the display card. A simply right-click and “Update Driver” action on the “Standard VGA Adapter” quickly got the latest WDDM drivers for my nVidia GeForce Go 7950 GTX – not really the latest/greatest card out there but quite good enough to play the latest games at 1920x1200!

Next, came the essentials. First, I tried installing the AVG 8.5 Pro for which I have a personal license. However, at the end of the install Win7 game me a “Compatibility Issue” message and rolled the install back. I then downloaded the latest release of the AVG 8.5 and this worked perfectly. Next came WinRAR and CloneDrive and both worked fine as well. Then I installed Office 2007 and the newly released Service Pack 2. And finally installed stuff like Visual Studio 2008 SP1 and SQL Server 2008 SP1.

Some noticeable changes are in the UI as mentioned in the E7 blog. Also, i see that the problem of connecting to Hosted Exchange as mentioned and solved in my earlier post no longer exists. So you can connect to Exchange with your email address as username again. A number of new themes, Aero effects and other changes are visible too.

I also installed the new Windows Virtual PC. It’s got a completely revamped interface that integrates well with Windows Explorer and finally get USB support! YAY!!!

Overall, the Windows 7 Release Candidate is a great upgrade to have and now I’m starting to look forward to the final RTM for Win7 as well.