I don’t know if this is a sign that I have to turn in my PC geek badge or not, but I now own a Macbook. True, it’s the latest entry level Macbook. And I did take a screwdriver to it first thing. And it is running Windows 7 Professional x64 in addition to MacOS.
It pains me to think that I’ve contributed to Apple’s stellar quarter not once, not twice, but three times. I picked up an iPad (just a Wi-Fi version, but 64GB), bought the Macbook and recently upgraded to an iPhone 4.
And here’s a shot of the various Windows 7 upgrades. So far, I’ve installed several onto the five gaming systems I have set
up here. Some, of course, have already been running Windows 7, which I obtained from my Technet account, and have been using in articles on Windows 7.
There’s not really a lot I can add to the hoopla about Windows 7. Like any new OS release from Microsoft, there is good and bad. But for our weekly LAN party group, I’m looking forward to moving everyone to 64-bit Windows 7.
Four of five gaming rigs in the basement lab are now running Windows 7.
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I’ve been running the full release of Windows 7 since the RTM went up in August on TechNet, but today is the day that most users who are so inclined will pick up a copy of Windows 7 and attempt to install it.
Most of them will be successful. Windows 7 setup is remarkable forgiving, but some users will still have issues. Even I had a problem with one older laptop based on the original Core 2 Duo, in which Windows 7 installed fine, but the HD audio device refuses to work even though the driver reports itself as working normally.
Of course, there will be people who have issues, sometimes serious ones. That’s the nature of the PC.
When I was editor at ExtremeTech, I wrote several articles on building very tiny PCs. These didn’t offer great performance, but they were very compact, and useful as “kitchen” PCs, or maybe car PCs. They all suffered from some caveats. Some, like the original (Fit-PC Slim were very small, but the performance was just too anemic for general use, though they were useful in certain dedicated applications.
I also built one Intel Atom-based system, using a Travla C156 case. While compact, I could have used any mini-ITX motherboard with that, and the north bridge on the particular motherboard I used had a pretty noisy fan. So when Intel dropped off yet another Atom motherboard kit with me, I wasn’t initially very interested.
It’s inevitable that whenever Microsoft does something, someone will complain about it.
That’s happening with Windows 7, with the actual official launch date still ten days off. The most visible slam against Windows was from my old boss, Jim Louderback, who wrote of his woes with Microsoft’s new OS, stating that Windows 7 is Vista all over again. Whoa, now that’s harsh.
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This is all kinds of awesome.
Yes, I’m being snarky. A little.
So the Windows 7 House Party Kit arrived. Now, I signed up through an email blast I received, well before that lame ”Hosting Your Party” video hit the street. Since I host our Friday Night Follies LAN party most weeks, I thought that having some weird theme like this to one of them might be mildly amusing.
Shall we build a system?
Recently, I decided it was time to replace one of the gaming rigs in my office LAN. On most Fridays, my LAN party group gets together for what we affectionately call “Friday Night Follies.” I usually build systems out of older parts for the LAN party systems, which are generally good enough for the games we play.
This time around, though, I wanted to build something a little more current. So I decided to build a compact system based around Gigabyte’s P55-UD4 micro ATX motherboard and a Core i5 750. Part of my rationale was to test long term stability. You can run all the benchmarks in the world, but there’s nothing quite like hammering on a system in a current generation multiplayer game to really test system stability.
Microsoft and Intel gathered a bunch of the tech media to talk up their collaborative efforts during the development of Windows 7. As is usual with these events, there was a mix of very technical media (Gordon Mah Ung and Will Smith from Maximum PC were there) as well as mainstream media. The main content actually offered some good technical info on some of the underpinnings of Windows 7.
As is also usual with these sorts of events, both Microsoft and Intel representatives spent time dodging pesky, “off message” questions from mainstream media. Questions about AMD, Apple and other similar topics were deftly and sometimes not-so-deftly dodged.
While what was all very amusing, the tech content is worth talking about. I’m going to touch on a couple of topics near and dear to my heart: multicore performance and energy efficiency.
Welcome to the third in the series of Windows 7 RTM diaries. This one is about upgrading 32-bit Vista to 32-bit Windows 7 on fairly average hardware.
In the previous two articles, I wrote about clean installs of 64-bit Windows 7 onto pretty high end hardware. Not everyone has a Core i7 and 12GB of RAM, however. And more than a few users will want to take the upgrade path (as opposed to a clean install) from 32-bit Windows.
So this time, we’re taking the upgrade path. I upgraded one of the gaming rigs that’s used for the Friday Night Follies LAN parties. This particular system has been running Vista Home Premium for about a year now.
So how did the upgrade go?
This is a first of a series of articles that are more a diary on my experience bringing up the Windows 7 RTM, and not so much a how-to – though it’s my hope that this series will help users who are looking to upgrade.
The Windows 7 RTM (release to manufacturing) is gradually making its way into the hands of users. Subscribers to Microsoft’s TechNet and MSDN already have it in hand, but it will be several months before most users can actually pick up a copy.
I’ve got a Windows 7 reference system running, and it’s humming along nicely. I don’t have much on it yet, although I just downloaded the Windows XP Mode release candidate), which I’ll be checking out for a freelance assignment.
Of course, having the shipping version in hand leads me to my next step: upgrading my primary production system to Windows 7. I’m running the Win7 release candidate now. Since it’s my production system, it’s a little complicated. So here’s what I’m doing to prep for installing Windows 7 RTM on my main machine.
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