Windows 7 RC

[Guest LilBambi]

Windows 7 Beta is out and many have given it a test run.Post your thoughts on Windows 7 here.There have been several topics already on Windows 7 Beta in All Things Windows. Here are just a few:Windows 7 beta UAC completely vulnerable to malware Windows 7 story Windows 7 beta with Applications reportWindows 7 beta with Radeon 7500 videoWindows 7 with Hardware reportInterview with Mike Ybarra and Windows 7 featuresHands-on video guide to Windows 7Win 7 RocksWindows 7 and MP3Windows 7So if you are looking for comments, there are quite a few from folks that have test driven it.Some Windows 7 sites elsewhere on the Internet:"Official" Windows 7 Forum: http://windows7forums.com/Over time we will see even more as we get closer to the final Windows 7 release.

Edited April 28, 2009 by LilBambi
Addition of links

[Frank Golden]

Windows 7 Beta is out and many have given it a test run.Post your thoughts on Windows 7 here.There have been several topics already on Windows 7 Beta in All Things Windows. Here are just a few:Windows 7 beta UAC completely vulnerable to malware Windows 7 story Windows 7 beta with Applications reportWindows 7 beta with Radeon 7500 videoWindows 7 with Hardware reportInterview with Mike Ybarra and Windows 7 featuresHands-on video guide to Windows 7Win 7 RocksWindows 7 and MP3Windows 7So if you are looking for comments, there are quite a few from folks that have test driven it.Over time we will see even more as we get closer to the final Windows 7 release.

Here's a link to the "official" Win 7 forum.http://windows7forums.com/

[Gary]

A screen shot of Windows 7 Build 7068.

[Gary]

I am now running Build 7100 RC1 and it is great to be able to have and run an OS without IE 8, and WMP. I have removed both of those Windows Apps.

[lewmur]

I tried build 7057 and my first impression was that it is going to be a culture shock for anyone coming from XP. It's not a question of doing things better or worse but doing them in a different way for no apparent reason. Setting up my LAN was a real bear. Seems Win7 makes it very easy only if ALL the computers on the LAN are running Win7.Personally, I don't see any great "goodies" that I wish were there in XP and it did "break" some older hardware. Couldn't get my scanner to work or my ATI TV Wonder card.

[Gary]

I tried build 7057 and my first impression was that it is going to be a culture shock for anyone coming from XP. It's not a question of doing things better or worse but doing them in a different way for no apparent reason. Setting up my LAN was a real bear. Seems Win7 makes it very easy only if ALL the computers on the LAN are running Win7.Personally, I don't see any great "goodies" that I wish were there in XP and it did "break" some older hardware. Couldn't get my scanner to work or my ATI TV Wonder card.

True but if you are coming from Vista to Win 7 there is a huge culture shock as IMHO Vista should have been Win 7 or vice versa. I couldn't get my scanner to work in Vista and Lexmark said that they would not create a driver to fix it, so I had to purchase another 3 in one. All of my hardware that worked under Vista works in Windows 7. Win 7 rocks There is even some talk that Windows Xp wiill be part of some versions of Win 7 in a VM.

[hkspike]

Could one of you guys give me a brief instruction set on how to partition a laptop so I can play around with Win7, please? I've only got EASEUS Partiton Manager on this laptop; maybe not the most sophisticated but it did the job I needed originally of resizing. What are the pitfalls and what needs to be done to keep everything running smoothly.Thanks!

[Gary]

Create an NTFS partition of about 100gb minimum. And when you boot the Win 7 DVD chose the custom installation and install it to that partition. If you are using WinXp or Vista as your main OS install Vista Boot Pro on that OS. It will make things easier. (not required)

[Frank Golden]

Could one of you guys give me a brief instruction set on how to partition a laptop so I can play around with Win7, please? I've only got EASEUS Partiton Manager on this laptop; maybe not the most sophisticated but it did the job I needed originally of resizing. What are the pitfalls and what needs to be done to keep everything running smoothly.Thanks!

Backup your present data in case something goes wrong when you create the NTFS partition.It doesn't happen often but there is some risk in resizing, moving partitions.I have had Partition Magic make a mess of a drive, nothing permanent but reformat was required.Having said thatWhat do you have on the drive presently ie: Operating systems etc? What is the partition structure of the drive right now?How big is your drive? Do you have any empty partitions available? I have Win 7 installed on a 22 GB partition located at the physical end of my drive. That is one thing nice about Win 7 compared to XP. Win 7 can be installed anywhere on a HDD. I've never been able to get a dual boot/multi boot with XP to work without first installing XP at the physical start of a drive.

[Guest LilBambi]

Thanks for the Windows 7 Forum link Frank. I have added it to the first posting. If anyone has a Windows 7 specific link they would like to add, post it here and I will add it to the list.

[Gary]

It is 6.1 as that is what MS wanted it to be. Why isn't it 7? I removed IE 8 so I can't answer that, Firox, however does spell check.

[hkspike]

Guys, thanks for your help. I have it running nicely on a 30Gb partition on my laptop. I've not hooked everything up, so far from an ultimate test. To date, it does seem to do everything I ask of it. Except that, all other networked compters can see it but cannot copy files to any folder under Win7. Reverse path ok. So I've missed something, I'd guess. The workgroup name is the same. Not sure about the default fish: after the pretty swirling colour dots merging into the MS logo, a fish is a bit of a flop, it's not even Nemo.

[patio]

There is even some talk that Windows Xp wiill be part of some versions of Win 7 in a VM.

Howdy Gary !Found this article that lists some (not all) CPU's that will support the XP VM function in Win7....Apparently it will not run on all machines.Story Here.Take Care,patio. Edited May 22, 2009 by patio

[Guest LilBambi]

I haven't installed Win7RC yet, but it is downloaded and I have my key, but I did have a chance to look at the login screen on my Jim's installation and since we use Debian Lenny, I would have to agree the login background does look similar, although different.I look forward to trying Win7RC in Virtual Box on Debian Lenny. I just haven't had time to play with it yet.

[Corrine]

Not sure about the default fish: after the pretty swirling colour dots merging into the MS logo, a fish is a bit of a flop, it's not even Nemo.

Here's the story behind the fish: The Story of the Windows 7 Beta Fish - Better said the betta fish - SoftpediaI do like the splash screen and used it to replace the fish. The image name is oobe (Out Of Box Experience) and you should be able to locate it in System32\oobeThere's some good info here: Tim Sneath : The Bumper List of Windows 7 Secrets

[patio]

That Bumper List is loaded with info....Thanx Corrine.

[Frank Golden]

Here's the story behind the fish: The Story of the Windows 7 Beta Fish - Better said the betta fish - Softpedia

And who says MS developers don't have a sense of humor?

[Frank Golden]

BTW,I've got a whole folder full of jpegs at my screen's resolution and I use the slideshow feature in Win 7 to change the backgrounds on a regular basis.

Edited May 24, 2009 by Frank Golden

[Peachy]

Okay, I've finally installed Windows 7 RC on a notebook (so far I've only had it running on desktops). I bought a new 500GB Seagate 5400.6 drive (my old 250GB drive was chock full) and installed a clean build of RC. This is the 64-bit version and right off the bat it performs faster than the original 32-bit Vista Home Premium that was in this Core 2 Duo T8100 notebook with 3GB of RAM. Now, for something no one has talked about in these forums but if you do a Google search for the term, "windows 7 vhd booting" you will get a tonne of articles on how to do this. It seems one of the new features of Windows 7 that has not been given enough attention in the mainstream computer press with the exception of a number of IT admin blogs, is the ability of the new operating system to boot directly from a virtual disk image file. Yes, you heard me, full-on hardware based virtual boot. As in booting from a .vhd disk image file. The .vhd image file format is the container used by Microsoft's Virtual PC and in fact the same .vhd can be used in Virtual PC (but probably not the other way around) or in the way that I've achieved on my notebook. Microsoft has made some changes to the boot manager and given it the ability to boot a .vhd. You can also create .vhd files using diskpart. You can also mount .vhd files directly into the GUI using Disk Management in the Administrative Tools control panel and assign it a drive letter. So what you see here is a Windows 7 RC that can be booted as a dual boot with a traditionally installed Windows 7. Think about it. You can dual boot Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 from image files without having to repartition an existing hard drive. You can have as many .vhd images booting off your hard drive as needed. What's really cool is that if you are brave enough, you can overwrite an existing Vista installation's bootmgr and bcdedit with a Windows 7 version and dual boot a virtual disk Windows 7 with Vista. Now, this isn't gonna be a normal use for most computer users but for some of us Highlanders this has a lot of potential for testing new drivers without toasting a known good setup. It's also portable. You can move the .vhd file from one machine to another (as long as you remember to sysprep it before booting it on completely new hardware) or backup .vhd files to external storage.

[goretsky]

Hello,One more interesting thing about the beta fish wallpaper: Count the number of bubbles streaming from the fish. Regards,Aryeh Goretsky

[Guest LilBambi]

Win7 RC works great in Virtual Box too! Yea!

[Frank Golden]

What an adventure!I'm posting this in the hopes of preventing someone, somewhere some grief if they use a similar approach to setting up a new HDD. I just purchased a new, larger (Seagate Momentus 7200 rpm HDD,320 GB) to replace the 200 GB Momentus 7200 rpm drive I've been using for awhile now. This is in an Acer notebook.MY plan was to create bit by bit images of all the OS installs on the old drive (XP Pro, 4 Linux distros and Win 7 RC 32 bit)using "Partimge" an open source image creation tool. I then formatted the new drive exactly like the old one with respect to the OS partitions and the shared Linux swap partition. The increased disk space was split between my NTFS Programs partition (shared between the 2 Windows installs) and the Fat 32 partition I share with and can access Read/Write from all OS's, Linux and Windows alike.This created about 3 times more space for both these data partitions.Now where it gets complicated.I anticipated issues so I clean installed XP on the first partition, like it is installed on the old drive and then clean installed Win 7 RC on the last partition again like the old drive. I figured this would set u the bootloader correctly for what I did next.I then used "partimage" to restore the previously prepared images obtained from the old drive to the same locationson the new one.Rebooting resulted in bootfailure errors. Specifically Win 7 failed , complaining about ntldr missing or corrupt.Running the install disc as suggested by the error message and performing a repair fixed Win 7 and allowed me to boot Win 7. When Win 7 rebooted it sucessfully recognized the new drive it was installed on and setup "drivers" for it, normal behavior for restoring a "partimage" image to a partition on another drive.I still could not boot XP though, getting the same error message when choosing the XP entry from the Win 7 boot menu.Running XP install disc and choosing repair and "fixboot" restored the XP bootloader and allowed me to boot XP.Again XP recognized the new drive it was installed on and setup "drivers" just like Win 7 did earlier.Using EasyBCD 1.7.2 (I have it installed in both XP and Win 7) I restored the Win 7 bootloader and thought I had it beat.Trying to boot XP from the Win 7 menu gave the same error.On a hunch I opened EasyBCD from Win 7 and clicked the "Change Settings" button and noticed that the Entry Based Setting for XP showed the drive letter as C: where I knew I had assigned J: to the XP partition in Win 7, C: being the root partition of Win7.Could it be this easy? Yup, changing the erroneous drive letter in EasyBCD to J: fixed my boot issues, allowing me to boot both XP and Win 7.As for my Linux installs that was easy, I installed Ubuntu Hardy 64 to sda5, the partition it is installed to on the old drive (Hardy 64 is where my Grub bootloader stage 1.5 is located and where my /boot/grub/menu.lst is). Clean installing Ubuntu to sda5 restored Grub stage 1 to the MBR (overwriting the existing Windows MBR) detecting my Windows installs and creating the appropriate entries in menu.lst.I now used "partimage" and restored my 4 Linux installs to their respective partitions including the Hardy install on sda5.I now have a new much bigger drive with everything like the old except for two storage partitions being larger and I didn't have to go thru the trouble of installing XP and Win 7 from scratch with all my apps and customizations (at one point I thought this to be a real possibility).All told it took about 6 hours including prep time (creating the images using "partimage" and setting up the new drive partition structure using Partition Magic 8). PM8 works great for setting up the new drive. I run it from XPon the old drive with the new one installed in an external USB enclosure. It creates NTFS, Fat32, ext3 and linux swap partitions easily.I figured I saved about 20 hours or more using this approach and would have been done sooner if I hadn't had to figure out my boot issues.As I said at the beginning of this rather lengthy post, "What an adventure".

Edited June 6, 2009 by Frank Golden

[sunrat]

Might have been easier to clone the old drive to the new one with dd and then create a new data partition afterwards.

[Frank Golden]

Might have been easier to clone the old drive to the new one with dd and then create a new data partition afterwards.

Since I have a paid license to Partition Magic 8 I might as well use it. Creating the partition structure using PM 8 isa snap, a big plus is that PM 8 "understands" Linux file systems like ext2, ext3, reiser fs and linux swap.DD is a CLI tool, I'm more comfortable using GUI tools like PM 8.My only problem during all this, and the issue that consumed the most time was the Win 7 boot issues. Now that I knowwhat to do it won't be an issue in the future.A person at another forum suggested using the Seagate DiscWizard tool which has a disc cloning tool.I tried it on my old drive intending to clone everything to a spare drive I have.DiscWizard refused to clone the drive, complaining that my ext3 partitions were corrupt.I tried DiscWizard on a drive that had only XP and Win 7 plus 2 data partitions, it worked perfectly, fully automating the process. Including cloning the data partitions total time to completion 110 minutes.To bad it doesn't work on drives with ext3 partitions.

[Corrine]

Since the expiration of the Windows 7 RC is rapidly approaching, it is time to unsticky this topic. Notifications will start appearing on February 15, 2010, with warnings that the operating system will soon expire. More importantly, starting on March 1, 2010, computers still using the RC will begin shutting down every two hours. Any work in progress will not be saved during the shutdown.The Windows 7 RC will fully expire on June 1, 2010. Computers running the Windows 7 RC will continue shutting down every two hours with no files being saved during shutdown. In addition, the wallpaper will change to a solid black background with a persistent message on the desktop. This will be accompanied by periodic notifications that Windows isn’t genuine, resulting in the inability to obtain optional updates or downloads requiring genuine Windows validation.Additional information here.

[Frank Golden]

Since the expiration of the Windows 7 RC is rapidly approaching, it is time to unsticky this topic. Notifications will start appearing on February 15, 2010, with warnings that the operating system will soon expire. More importantly, starting on March 1, 2010, computers still using the RC will begin shutting down every two hours. Any work in progress will not be saved during the shutdown.The Windows 7 RC will fully expire on June 1, 2010. Computers running the Windows 7 RC will continue shutting down every two hours with no files being saved during shutdown. In addition, the wallpaper will change to a solid black background with a persistent message on the desktop. This will be accompanied by periodic notifications that Windows isn’t genuine, resulting in the inability to obtain optional updates or downloads requiring genuine Windows validation.Additional information here.

Yup, I've been using Win 7 Home premium since December. Purchased the full retail with money I won at my local Casino.I really appreciate MS for making first the beta and then the RC available to us mere mortals to test.I'm quite happy with Win 7.

[patio]

I kept the BETA and now the RC still running on a seperate HDD just to see the timeout process...pretty funny actually.The BETA would shut down for an hour at random times of the day...we'll see what the RC does...so far no notifications.

[Corrine]

Notifications should start a week from today, patio.