Thursday 15 October 2009

Windows 7 has landed on my company laptop

Just had Windows 7 Enterprise Installed on my DELL Precision M4300 laptop, all hooked up to the domain. My first job was to get all the correct drivers for the display, network card, bluetooth interface, sound card - Windows 7 default drivers allowed everything to work but my Windows Experience Index was at a measly 1!

After installing the NVIDIA Quadro FX 360M driver, Broadcom NetXtreme gigabit controller, SigmaTel High Def Audio this allowed me to re-run the System Rating, my results are below:




This then allowed the Aero theme to be chosen (as previously only Basic was available):


Happy times! Looks great. One issue I had was that initially I made the changes to my profile but on logging off and logging back on again Windows said my profile information was in use by another user, then defaulted to what looked to be a safe mode. On logging out and back in again my real profile appeared, less any of the theme changes made before. All very strange, but has not happened since!

Connecting to my network printers proved more of a pain, mainly because the network drivers are not compatible with this new 64bit O/S. Downloading then from the HP website proved equally impossible, but got there eventually.

Adobe 6 Professional was re-installed, and patched, but failed to add the "Print to PDF" option within my Printers dialog - the thing I use the most. Not sure what I am going to do about this.

Firefox - for some reason will fail to display web pages (including the link to this very blog), but WILL work in IE8 - strange but true. Wonder if anyone else has noticed this?



Finally an error with my CISCO IP Communicator - on loading shows the following error (cannot find a mention of the same error on google):



On looking at new tools for 7 I came across this fantastic bit of kit from Stardock http://www.stardock.com/ called "Fences". It has a small footprint and allows you to "contain" all your desktop icons into meaningful categories. I was a bit sceptical at first as to whether this would be of any real benefit, but after using it for 2 days its great! Definitely recommend this:



Anyway that's all for now, so far so good and long may this trend continue. The distinct Windows 7/Vista start up and login sounds, along with its visually striking interface is already creating a stir amongst the office (they are just jealous) :)

3 comments:

  1. I had a similar problem with a networked HP colour printer. They had vista x64 drivers but no matter what a tried it wouldn't install.
    To get it working I tried out HPs Universal Print Driver. This has a special mode called "Dynamic Printing" which got my printer working fine (I can also use it for any other HP printer.

    For PDF printing I use the great PDFCreator which is an opensource PDF printer. Really light but flexible - www.pdfforge.org

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  2. According to Dell and nVidia, the Video Card for the M4300 (the Quadro FX 360M) isn't supported by Win 7..

    So just how did you download an update?

    Did you use the Vista Drivers?

    Neil T.

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  3. Never mind - did a more thorough search of the NVidia site and found the general Win 7 video driver update - which includes the M4300.

    http://www.nvidia.com/object/notebook_winvista_win7_x64_186.81_whql.html

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