In my last post on my experiences with Windows 7 I wrote how it helped me to find a driver and fix a problem I didn’t know I had. Today I have a slightly different take. I have been installing the important driver updates whenever they show up on Microsoft update. Along with the important updates I have been picking an optional update to install as well. Today I worked my way down the list to one that appears to be for my smart card reader but I wasn’t sure. I decided to click on the “More information” link on the Windows Update screen. It took me to the following web page.

So while it seems that Windows 7 itself isn’t showing any problems there might be things with the extended ecosystem around Windows 7 that need to be finished before the general availability later this year. Having the driver information “Coming Soon” is not a big deal right now as my solution is to skip this driver for now and install a different optional driver. Sooner or later I will come back to the driver and by then I hope it will have some information.

I spent the weekend backing up Vista and doing a clean install of Windows 7. When I went to bed Sunday night I thought I had everything set up and ready to go but yesterday I kept finding things like printers that I had neglected.

I haven’t installed Office 2010 yet because I downloaded the 64 bit version (I am running Windows 7 64 bit) but I have installed a 32 bit version of Office 2007 and the beta tells me they can’t be installed side by side. I can live with that in a beta and expect that it will be fixed before the final release.

Windows 7 certainly seems a lot faster. For one thing it doesn’t take me 30 minutes to get from power on to the hard drive to stop spinning. I am not going to do a complete comparison because I don’t have SQL server and a few other services installed yet. After I do that I will publish the results of the differences in boot time.

One thing I am really loving is that Windows 7 is proactive in finding updates for me. The screenshot below is from the “Solve PC Issues” flag in the jump bar. I clicked on the message that said there is an issue with my memory card/memory card reader.

Clicking on the link allows me to download the patch and fix the issue. I hadn’t tried to use the memory card reader so I probably would have found out about the problem while I was on vacation away from any Internet connection and needed to download a lot of pictures off of a digital camera.

It is little usability features like this that make the difference between something that I have to use and something that is a pleasure to use.

Yesterday the release version of Windows 7 became available to MSDN subscribers. I got on and started downloading it about 20 minutes after it was available. The expected download time jumped around between 33 and 21 hours depending on the current download speed. I left the download running overnight and was expecting to burn a DVD this morning. When I checked I found that I have only downloaded 63% and that the message says it is trying to connect. Bummer. At least I was able to get in and download some of it. I remember other releases where the servers were overwhelmed and you couldn’t even connect.

I need to fix my machine in a bad way. Start up times have been going up and this morning the wired network connection refused to connect to the external world (it appeared to not get a DHCP address) even though it worked fine last night and hardware wise it seems to be working. I have been holding out for Windows 7 to do the format/install because I didn’t want to lose two weekends.

I have loved testing Windows 7 and am looking forward to having the better performance (even if it is only perceived) and learning more about the interface as I use Windows 7 as my primary OS. I have been testing in a VPC until now so I haven’t tested the XP emulation. I have some software, most notably for a digital camcorder, that only runs under XP and when I upgraded my last machine to Vista I was unable to get the video off of tape and onto DVD. I hope this fixes the problem. I may find I am going to have to go back and build out a XP virtual machine and boot into it just to transfer video. I hope I don’t have to go all the way back to installing on metal to get the XP support that I need.

I am also looking forward to learning more about programming for Windows 7. I think a lot of the negative press about Vista came from early applications that “didn’t work the Vista way”. Which means they didn’t necessarily take advantage of the Aero UI or didn’t work well under UAC. With the excitement around Windows 7 I hope more applications will be updated to run better under Windows 7.

My general plan for upgrading my machine is

1. Back up the files using at least 2 different methods. I will do a Windows backup and use Acronis TrueImage to snap an image of the hard drive that I could restore back to if everything fails.
2. Install Windows 7 as a clean install.
3. Set up VPN connectivity and rejoin the domain.
4. Set up my domain user and make sure that my remote connectivity VPN, RAS, etc. works for that user.
5. Create another backup with Acronis TrueImage so I can get back to this point easily.
6. Install KeePass, Office 2010 beta (I got an invite last week) and Visual Studio 2008.

At that point I should have most of what I need to work on Monday morning. Other programs that I need to install would include things like Camtasia, Firefox, SQL Server, and Zune. I will blog again on Monday about how my “lost weekend” went.