WetLeather Motorcycle Rider Information

My now-venerable Dell Inspiron E1705, Intel Core Duo T2500 2GHz, Intel 945 Express graphics, 2GB RAM, 200GB Hitachi 5400RPM SATA drive, had Vista on one partition and Win7 RC on another. Before doing the Win7 install, I used Windows Easy Transfer on Vista and separately on Win7 RC to make separate backup/transfer bundles to an external USB disk drive (WD MyBook Home 500GB).

And I also backed-up all my data files and documents as I normally do every week, using SyncToy to my home server.

Downloaded en_windows_7_professional_x86_dvd_x15-65804.iso from MSDN and burned it to a DVD on my Dev desktop (Dell Vostro 400 running Vista Business, with a USB-attached LG Super Multi burner). Dropped the DVD in to the laptop's built-in drive and booted from it. Deleted both Windows partitions, leaving only the Dell maintenance partition. Told Win7 to use the remaining space. It first created a 100MB "System files" partition, then the main partition. I think this has something to do with the new BitLocker features, but need to research it further.
After taking a long time (30 minutes?) to load and decompress the install files, the installer choked. It complained about "cannot copy or install the required file" (WHICH file was not identified), and suggested starting over. I burned another DVD, which wouldn't even boot. I blew air and dusted the lens on the laptop DVD drive and then booted the first DVD, same long time to decompress, then the install went normally after that.

After the initial boot and configure (timezone, etc.), and having it download Windows Updates (yes, even 1 week after release, there are already Important Updates), I joined the machine to my home Domain. Then I logged-in to my normal Domain user account (a member of the Domain Admins group), and did everything else from there.

I used Windows Easy Transfer on the new RTM Win7 to restore first my Vista files/settings, then my Win7 files/settings from the backups made earlier. This also went without a hitch. It allows mapping "old" users to "new" users so it can move settings/files from one user to another, which I found interesting, but did not need at this time. After a reboot for each set of transfers/restores, my desktop settings, data files, documents, and MOST program settings were in place just as they had been on my "old computer" (actually the same computer, under older OS versions). For some reason, PuTTY's settings, kept in the Registry, were not transferred - though I didn't find this out until I installed PuTTY.

Also transferred-over were all my mapped drive settings. This was very handy for snarfing the WPA key, PuTTY Registry settings and public key files, _vimrc, etc. from my desktop box over the wired Ethernet. This laptop is now venerable enough that all the requried drivers are included in the standard Microsoft package, EXCEPT the Synaptics touchpad. Oh, it works as a basic touchpad, but for the  enhanced features (edge-scrolling, hotspots), I had to download the Vista driver from Dell. No big deal.

Then on to installing the basic software necessities:
VirtualCloneDrive (for mounting ISO images)
Office 2007 Pro & SP2
Firefox (3.5.2)
CDBurnerXP (freeware replacement for all the important features of Roxio)
PuTTY (terminal emulator/ssh client)
Quicken 2009
AOL Instant Messenger (eh, they like it at work)
Flash Player
Adobe Reader

About here, I got tired and shut down for the night. The Suspend button (a Dell Nerve Pinch) promptly and accurately put the machine to sleep with no muss, no fuss and very speedy startup the next morning. I continued loading the Comfort Essentials:

Avast antivirus Home edition
iTunes
Dropbox (getdropbox.com)
KeePass Password Safe
GVim text editor
FileZilla (ftp client)
Glary Utilities
Autoruns and Procmon from Sysinternals/Microsoft
TortoiseSVN (Subversion client)
SyncToy 2.0
Canon MX850 network printer/scanner drivers
Picasa

So far, all good. Today's payday. My Certificate Store in Firefox was preserved by this migration, so I didn't have to look up the false answers I gave to my credit union "security" questions in order to do online banking.  Quicken files were all copied and restored, of course. Pretty much everything is up and working finely.

One glitch (install DVD, probably a read error). Otherwise, clear sailing and, subjectively anyway,  better performance than Vista for everything I've tried.

Addendum 2009-08-22: Installing x64 on Dev desktop
- Install went lots faster on the quad-core 4GB RAM machine

Additional software on the desktop Dev box:
7zip
Roxio Creator 2009 (install took forever, main program wouldn't start after install. Starting Label Creator and then using "Check for Updates" from its Help menu downloaded an April 2009 patch that made it all work [I think])
Adobe Production Premium CS3 - what a hassle with serial number mess!
Visual Studio 2008 (without SQL Express)
Remember to turn on IIS before installing SQL Server next time...
SQL Server 2005
Instant Eyedropper
DVD Shrink 3.2
SharpKeys
Windows Virtual PC and XP Mode (beta)
7-Zip
FLV Player
VLC video player
Logitech QuickCam drivers
LogMeIn
Audacity and LAME encoder
Google Chrome browser
Handbrake

Addendum 2009-08-28 XP Mode
XP Mode is interesting. I now have a handy icon on my (Win 7) desktop that launches IE6 in the XP Mode VM.  Very handy for testing websites that clients insist *will* be visited by users with painful computer ignorance and/or willfully sociopathic IT organizations.

It takes about 15 seconds to start up from "cold"; 2 or 3 seconds to start a second one. It "feels" a touch slower than running on the "real" (non--virtualized) machine, but that's very subjective as I've never run XP or IE6 on this "real" machine. And it's not as if it's _sluggish_ or anything. FWIW, a few quick tests to speedtest.net returned download speeds the SAME for FF3.5 on the real machine and IE6 on XP Mode, within the margin of error. Upload speeds showed significantly worse on XP Mode. I wonder why?

Addendum 2009-09-06 Glitches
This Dell (Vostro 400, quad-core 2.4GHx, 4GB RAM) somehow persuades Windows 7 (Professional x64) that Hardware Virtualization is disabled in the BIOS. This prevents Win7 “XP Mode” from running, as XP Mode requires hardware virtualization support. The hardware and BIOS definitely support it. I verified the hardware with Intel’s CPU Identification Tool, and triple-checked the BIOS settings. I think it’s happening when the OS is re-booted WITHOUT power-off of the hardware. At least, powering-off the hardware (with no changes to BIOS or other settings) seems to reset it so that XP Mode is happy again. Very curious and irritating.