My Desultory Blog

Posted By RichC on June 23, 2009

I’ve been struggling to finish and tweak the install of the Microsoft Windows 7 Release Candidate OS before my Beta version expires — 8 days from now. Unfortunately for me, I embraced Windows 7 after switching from Vista back in January and couldn’t imagine going back, so onward I planned to go.  The initial install coming from  a 32 bit Vista OS was very easy, but the current move from the Beta to the RC not so. The install is not for the technically challenged IMHO.

Here’s what I did:

1. Purchase a new larger hard drive for my notebook computer – a Fujitsu 320GM 7200RPM drive from NewEgg for $69.99.
2. Borrow hard drive adapter (didn’t work) then bought one for $35 to make it easy to copy over data and drivers from my old drive.
3. At the end of the day I did a full back up of my old drive, then popped in the new drive, created two 155GB partitions and started the Win 7 RC install. (this may have been my big flaw as I intended to install the OS and Programs on one partition and user data on the second “BitLocker” partition.)
4. Next I copied over ‘user’ account information to the BitLocker Data partition followed by getting all my driver back using the device manager.
5. After a little television news, it was time to install Microsoft Office, One Note and the Adobe Creative Suite from CD … a slow process.
6. Started to download the latest versions of a few online software packages — Firefox, Thunderbird, Lightning, Skype, Crimson Editor and Avast! —  and realized that some disliked the ‘user’ data over on the ‘Bitlocker’ partition. I tinkered with the ‘mklink /D’ command line and was somewhat successful in linking each key directory to the E: drive (Bitlocker partition) … but realized that the only way to have the drive available was to enter a password for that drive each time I accessed it. The only way to access both is to also create a Bitlocker partition of the system files too — yet to do.

For the most part I was back running with necessary software and had what I needed for work today. Still to go are the extra items that I’ve been fighting with today. VLC, iTunes, Capture Express, Total Recorder, Palm Database, Truecrypt (probably don’t need?), Macrium, Adeona, the all important Sugarsync (causing me problems since directories have changed) and the biggest headache … Tweetdeck 0.26 and Adobe Air. For some reason the Twitter client wouldn’t function? Eventually I uninstalled and found a 0.25 version which installed fine and automatically updated to the new 0.26 version. <= If you have this problem … try it. (I’ve got the old verision if you can’t find it on the web)

So besides getting my desktop the way I want it, figuring out why my installed programs don’t show up under “Programs” in the “Start” menu,  bitlockering my systems partition and grabbing some spyware checking software, I think I’m on the road to running Windows 7 RC.

My advice is to purchase a new hard drive but don’t partition it unless you must or are going to use it for a different OS — ie. Linux or Windows XP. Unless you need Bitlocker, don’t bother or just create a single small partition for your critical files.

Here’s PDF of my scores using the “Windows Experience Index” tool.

Oh … and its a good time to give Sugarsync a try … 2GB FREE.

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Categories: Computer, Productivity
Tags: microsoft, windows 7 rc