Hi everyone, I’ve been considering starting a blog like this one for quite a while. And now I find myself with a bit of time that I otherwise don’t know what to do with.
Yesterday I decided to take the plunge and try out the Windows 7 Release Candidate. It’s not that I was in any way unhappy with Vista, in fact I’m one of the apparently few who think it works pretty well. I still remember the amount of problems I had with Windows XP, and the problems I’ve had with Vista so far are paling in comparison. Nevertheless, I wanted to see if I could get a smoother framerate out of my CoD4 with Windows 7.
So I started by going to Microsoft’s website to try and download the Release Candidate. My endeavors were adequately rewarded with the needed activation key, but that seemed to be where my luck ran out. After acquiring the Activation Key I attempted to download the actual .iso file I was supposed to burn to a DVD, but to no avail. Apparently the servers that were supposed to handle these files just couldn’t handle the preassure, so I laid course towards the great Google hunting fields and started looking for another place to download the files from.
The first 12-15 links I found led my directly back to Microsoft’s website that I had already established wouldn’t get me anywhere. but finally after what seemed like hours of searching I found a place where I could download Windows 7 Build 7100… and so I did.
The file was soon fully on my hard drive and I reached out for my last DVD-R cassette and opened it… it was empty. “Alright, no matter… I’ll just do the upgrade instead of the clean install”, I thought to myself. And so I did.
Smooth sailing all the way. everything seemed to work perfectly and after deleting all of the Windows.old files left on the machine from my Vista install I saw more free space on my System partition than I’d ever seen before. And after cleaning up my Data partition I was ready to install some games and test some framerates.
At least I thought I was… after installing Fallout three and arranging all the DLC files in the right places, I clicked “PLAY” and was promptly told that my graphics card wasn’t up to scratch as it apparently couldn’t do 3d animation. So I went straight to where I thought I’d be able to check up on my GeForce 8600M GT. Alas, it had apparently dissolved into nothingness while I was installing Windows 7. It just wasn’t there, not even in the Device Manager… I downloaded and ran CPU-z just to be absolutely sure it wasn’t just hiding somewhere, but no… it was gone.
So once again I took a trip to the great google hunting fields for a clue about what was going on and found some advice about updating the drivers (of course). So I downloaded the appropriate drivers for my graphics card from the Nvidia website and proceeded to install them. Except they kept telling me that I didn’t have the right hardware for the drivers.
After a bunch of failed attempts I decided to just shit on it all and go back to Vista. So now I’m sitting here at 4:30 am installing all my programs again. To make matters worse, I had tried to synch my iPod in Windows 7 with no apparent result, but when I got back to Vista it became apparent that my iPod which doubled as my back-up drive for music and podcasts had been royally f****d up. So while I’m installing all my programs again I’m working on rebuilding a respectable music library on a second computer which I can transfer to my own when it’s done.
Long story short, I’m definitely going to wait for the final version of Windows 7 to come out before I try that again.
