A painless installation

Hi

I did a lot of reading about the subject. I am a IT-wannabe. I LIKE doing things with and TO my PC.

I have been running a Vista Home Premium PC at home since, well, when Vista came out. I did a fresh Vista install and had hiccups with my printer, my I-Pod and my Tablet being recognised. (The printer STILL has issues - an HP Scanner/Printer/Copier that continually gets "USB Device NOT installed" when I try scanning using the scan button on the printer - if I use the "Toolbox" software that came with the printer, scanning is no problem)....but I digress...

So I thought I'd like to give this Win7 a go, but did not want to trash my Vista install. Dual-boot? Scary for me to contemplate but I did some reading and thought give it a go.

It was totally painless.

I used Vista's Disk Management tool to repartition my D Drive into a D of 300GB and a W of 200GB (C is Vista). No problem.

Downloaded and then burned the .ISO file, inserted the disc into the drive and from within Vista, went thru My Computer, found the disc, and hit it...

Did a clean install onto my recently created and formatted W Drive, 3 reboots and 40 minutes later I was presented with a Boot Screen,

1 Windows 7
2 Microsoft Vista

Picked 1, logged in and bingo, absolutely no problem. Printer, I-Pod, removeable HDD, Tablet, Office 2007 and EZCD Creator all loaded and operational.

Only hiccups...AVG Free would not install -it somehow "knew" it was on my Vista C Drive (how?) - and popped up a message that said it couldnt be concurrently installed. So I "uninstalled" it, downloaded and am using Avast Free. And NO sound. So in Device Manager, I clicked on my Audio Controller (Yellow Exclamation Mark), Update Driver, Search for Driver, pointed the search to my C Drive and bingo...installed driver from Vista into Win7 and all good!

Windows 7? A big TICK from me for install. I had seen the preview copy of it and did not like the look or feel of the new Taskbar. In the RC version though, with setting to smaller icons, I actually do like it. It's quite functional. Sidebar...or lack of...and having 'floating' gadgets took some getting used to. But I do like it.

What shall I use for newsgroups though? Windows Mail not being present?

I like the way Win 7 remembers how I size and position windows too, Vista a bit flaky on that.

I think I'll be getting the released version to upgrade my Vista when the RC stops functioning. I REALLY cant believe how painless it went. And on a 7 year old box (PCI - NOT PCI Express!) with 4gb RAM, 512MB Video card and dual DVD Drives and (now) "three" internal and one external drive.

Rgds
Roddy

Yo, about your printer... I use HP DeskJet F4280 AIO myself and I always keep my printer drivers, files up-to-date. Also there are updates like





Critical Update to Enhance Reliability of Network and USB Connectivity and Improve System Responsiveness While Printing

Critical Update to Correct a PC to Printer Communication Issue




In your case, there should be similar updates like mine listed on HP official website for your model, you should really download them and try.

Also keep your OS up-to-date too :)

Tks...will check back on HP site. Had been doing so with no luck so just forgot about it....

Rgds
Roddy

hey. painless install as well. then another.
but is it normal for windows to make reserved partition of ~100MB's?
i found that odd, considering it didnt do that the first time i installed it.

baarod said:

Yes, normal.

thank you