windows 7
I played with Windows 7 last night and spent far more time trying to get it running than I did experiencing it. I blame most of this on having older hardware. If I get more time this weekend, I'll explore Windows 7 further. From what I did see of Windows 7 running, it was very snappy even with only 1 gig of ram. I'm hoping I can get everything sorted and get more hands-on time with this new OS soon.
The two issues I had were the bad download and my stupid Dell BIOS doesn't recognize the DVD as a bootable device. 
So I had to install XP from CD to get a DVD driver in place.
so I could overwrite it with Win7.

So I had to install XP from CD to get a DVD driver in place.
so I could overwrite it with Win7.
My issues so far and what I've done...
-Bad download
Re-downloaded at work and made new DVD
-No driver available for USB wireless adapter
Tried looking for Vista driver to install but unfortunately the Belkin website was down. Waited about an hour for the website to come back online and downloaded driver. Installed driver with Belkin installation program and system wouldn't boot, it gave an error to the effect that a driver was the cause of this. Wasted an hour or so trying to fix it with the Windows 7 repair feature then tried a system rollback but neither fixed the problem. Ended up reinstalling Windows 7. Finally got wireless adapter to work by installing the driver on another pc, copying the extracted driver folder and installing on the Windows 7 machine by bypassing the Belkin installation program.
-No chipset support for Nforce2 chipset
Tried doing a Windows Update to obtain the drivers. It said it found drivers for sound, and PCI. System rebooted and said it installed a new driver for the Athlon XP CPU and needed to reboot. System hung when shutting down to reboot.
At that point it was close to 11pm and I have to get up at 5am. I shut the system down with the power switch and went to bed. I played with the OS between getting the wireless adapter to work and getting online and deciding to fix the chipset driver issues.
-Bad download
Re-downloaded at work and made new DVD
-No driver available for USB wireless adapter
Tried looking for Vista driver to install but unfortunately the Belkin website was down. Waited about an hour for the website to come back online and downloaded driver. Installed driver with Belkin installation program and system wouldn't boot, it gave an error to the effect that a driver was the cause of this. Wasted an hour or so trying to fix it with the Windows 7 repair feature then tried a system rollback but neither fixed the problem. Ended up reinstalling Windows 7. Finally got wireless adapter to work by installing the driver on another pc, copying the extracted driver folder and installing on the Windows 7 machine by bypassing the Belkin installation program.
-No chipset support for Nforce2 chipset
Tried doing a Windows Update to obtain the drivers. It said it found drivers for sound, and PCI. System rebooted and said it installed a new driver for the Athlon XP CPU and needed to reboot. System hung when shutting down to reboot.
At that point it was close to 11pm and I have to get up at 5am. I shut the system down with the power switch and went to bed. I played with the OS between getting the wireless adapter to work and getting online and deciding to fix the chipset driver issues.
Originally Posted by boltonblue' date='Jan 22 2009, 07:33 AM
The two issues I had were the bad download and my stupid Dell BIOS doesn't recognize the DVD as a bootable device. 
So I had to install XP from CD to get a DVD driver in place.
so I could overwrite it with Win7.

So I had to install XP from CD to get a DVD driver in place.
so I could overwrite it with Win7.the machine even starts to boot.
Was the DVD added on afterwards to your Dell? If not, I'm surprised the
BIOS wouldn't know about it.
Originally Posted by NH_s2k_Guy' date='Jan 22 2009, 09:23 AM
The BIOS upgrade doesn't reside on your O/S that is all accessed before
the machine even starts to boot.
Was the DVD added on afterwards to your Dell? If not, I'm surprised the
BIOS wouldn't know about it.
the machine even starts to boot.
Was the DVD added on afterwards to your Dell? If not, I'm surprised the
BIOS wouldn't know about it.
I had to install then boot into Xp so that I then had an operational DVD driver to launch the windows 7 installer from.
It came with the machine but were talking about Dell.
I've learned that they do lots of little things the 'Dell' way.

My opinion (for what it's worth) is to not put anything Beta, especially
an O/S on any machine that you care about. They call it Beta for
a reason...because it's loaded with bugs that they want people to
uncover for free.

I personally wait until the O/S has been out for at least a year and
my IT friends aren't grumbling about how much it sucks.
IT guys never quit grumbling about an OS until the next one comes out and then they use all of their energy bitching about that new one. it is only when they discover how bad the newest one sucks that they realize the last one wasn't so bad after all. This process will repeat as long as humans use computers.









