Windows 7 Installed

Last night I went to two stores and nobody had Windows 7 for sale early. I instead went home and bought it off Microsoft's website for download. It feels funny paying so much for a download that's all in one 3gb file. Luckily it's an ISO file and I will back it up. I was too impatient to wait to get it in a store.

I went with Windows 7 Professional Upgrade since I never got any earlier version of Vista to work with my Raid 1 setup that were listed as 'dynamic disks'. Vista Home Premium would only list them as 'invalid', but under Vista business they were working fine.

Install loaded and sat there for like 5 minutes without it doing anything. A prompt finally came up and even on my 3ghz Quad Core it seemed to take forever to install. It almost felt like something was wrong with my hard drive. It's a 640gb 7200rpm WD drive. I don't use my computer enough to NEED an SSD drive at the moment, but it's tempting.

I did a clean install and thankfully Windows moved my Program Files directory and other old stuff to Windows.old. I would have really not wanted them to be kept there to interfere with the new Windows install.

The only thing out of the box it did not support was my Creative X-Fi card. I had to download some drivers and it worked fine.

The only major problem I had is that when I tried to check into my printer drivers, Explorer would crash. It took me awhile to get it working. It's a Brother HL-5140 laser printer from abotu 4 years ago. It still lists a duplicate "HL-5140" printer that I can't remove.

The worst problem by far was trying to get WinDVD 7.0 working. The setup can't even be run it's so old. I paid for this program about 3 years ago and I guess it's just not going to work. I found a link on Microsoft's website and upgraded to version 10 for half price. Around $50. I just prefer WinDVD over PowerDVD somehow. WinDVD is so bloated and it's just the most annoying program ever to install, remove etc. It's getting to be like Nero.

So I went to install WinDVD 10 and when it asks me to install Quicktime the program freezes up and I have to close the installer. I try to install it again and it says it's already installed!! It's not listed in Add/Remove programs and there is no uninstaller to be found. I had to manually remove all of the Corel/WinDVD directories and about 500 entries in the registry. Had to search for 'WinDVD' and 'Corel'. What a pain. After that the installer worked.

While I was having so many problems my mouse stopped working. I tried 4 different batteries and still nothing. I tried a 5th battery and it started working. I guess it needed one that was 100% full.

So far I've had a few crashes in windows 7. Explorer crashed about half a dozen times total. Once I even got Task Manager to lock up. I did a log off somehow and then it froze. I rebooted and my mouse again wouldn't work and then my Wallpaper was gone. Strange.

Everything seems to be working fine right now. Maybe I shouldn't have gone with the 64-bit version. Who knows. I'm surprised Dreamweaver 8 and Quicken 2007 worked ok. Dreamweaver would crash a lot under Vista, hopefully it doesn't in Windows 7.

So far it's a LOT faster then Vista. Almost feels like I just got a faster computer.