I took Paul Thurrott’s challenge and installed Windows 7 Beta on my main computer; this Hp dv9074es laptop. After downloading the file from technet, burning it to DVD, along with backing up and moving some data, I formatted the C drive and installed Windows 7 Beta. The installation process? Smoother than ever. It did not take long until the system was up and running. After checking the Device Manager I found that there were 2 base computer devices (which turned out to be my Ricoh 5 in 1 card reader, and 1 additional cpu driver that hadn’t installed correctly. After opening the folder where I had my Vista x64 drivers, the Device Manager was clean in just about 5 minutes.

I then installed the KB961367 update, which fixes the bug that caused Win 7 to disrupt mp-3 files. Then I installed Norton Internet Security 2009 without a glitch. Next up was the Windows Live Essentials suite and then Office 2007. No problems whatsoever.

Then came the time to install iTunes…

First: I love my iPhone. It is just great, with all the shortcomings it has, it still is the best phone I have ever had. No doubt. Too bad that I have to use an app like iTunes to sync it (I know there are alternatives – but not complete alternatives).

To be honest I also found my first mistake in making backups before wiping the C drive; I had forgotten to backup my playlists… 🙁 . Anyway – after having installed iTunes, which in itself went without any problems, I find myself in a situation where it freezes or crashes when I try to edit album and song information, particularly when trying to add album art. Try adding it to 3 albums in a row – total freeze up. Not one button works and I have to resort to the Task Manager to quit the application – and even that does not work all the time. Bummer…

I don’t know whether this is related to one of the drivers in iTunes, iTunes itself or something in Windows 7, but it really p… me off for a while. Leaving the album art as it is makes the app workable although not perfect. Lets see it there will be an update on apple.com in the future. Unless, of course, this problem is only mine…

Besides that my first impressions of Windows 7 is good – really good. It is almost unbelievable that this is a beta product. The quality of it is simply stunning.

I will poke around the system for the next few days and then write up some more of my impressions, but for now it looks like Microsoft has got a winner or their hands.

edited; Removed the number 1 after “Windows 7 Beta” since it was incorrect; there is only going to be 1 public beta – next up is the Release Candidate!

Good intentions are obviously not enough! I had every intention of blogging here regularly, but as is quite obvious, that has not happened – at all! So enough of empty promises – I will only now say that I will try to keep this blog alive. How often I will blog? Well… as often as I feel like it.

A lot has changed since I last blogged when it comes to my computers, software I use as well as in my personal life;

– I still have the Hp dv9074ea laptop, but I have formatted the hard drive and installed Windows Vista Ultimate x64 on it this time around. I am very satisfied with the performance of the computer, although I wished that I could add some more RAM. Alas, I have already topped it with a maximum of 2 GB. On the negative, I must mention that along with a lot of other Hp dv users I have had to send in my machine for a motherboard replacement as the laptop totally died on me some months ago.

I had at the time also purchased a Hp dv6055 for my wife, that also ran into the same problem, only a couple of months after I bought it. Terrible! Besides that very annoying malfunction on both laptops we are both very satisfied with the performance of the machines.

– I have upgraded my desktop so that it now has a Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 processor with 6 GB of RAM, a Powercolor Radeon HD 4870 graphics card on a ASUS P5K-E Wireless motherboard. I have of course installed Windows Vista Ultimate x64 on this machine as well. It is a fast! machine that meets all my computing needs and then some. Although I am no heavy gamer, I do play the occasional game, and Crysis runs beautifully on it.

On a more personal note I am very happy to say that me and my wife are expecting our third child! 8 years since last time, but we are really looking forward to our new family member. And the kids just cannot wait until they see their new sister or brother. It has been so long since last time, that it almost feels like its the first time for both of us! Couldn’t have been better!

About future blogging;

Having 2 laptops and 2 desktops in the house means that there is a lot of maintenance to do.  And there are multiple copies of files spread over the lot. I have downloaded Live Mesh and SyncToy 2 and are at the moment trying to figure out how to sync my data between the different machines. For instance I would really like to have all my email on both my laptop and my desktop. I manage email through Outlook 2007 with the Outlook Connector software for gmail and hotmail, but I have not yet had the time to figure out how I will sync mail between the machines in order to have everything on both machines at the same time. I think SyncToy will do the trick. I will post here when I figure out how to do that.

Another topic is sharing multimedia data in the household. On the desktop hard disc I have more than 15000 digital pictures as well as approximately 7000 songs. I would really like to share these files with the rest of the computers in the household as well as to the Xbox 360. Windows Vista makes it easy to share and access, but being on a mostly wireless home network (g) I am not too impressed with the speed and usability. I will have to delve further into how to make my setup more user friendly. Posts to follow.

Well I think that should be enough for now. Promising more will probably be promising too much at the moment.

Any hints or tips on those topics are welcome indeed. 😉