Windows 7 nonsense

[CougTek]

DiscWizard does, but Acronis True Image WD Edition couldn't care less about Seagate drives.

 

[Will Rickards]

I just bought acronis 2010 upgrade, only $30.

 

[LunarMist]

Iv'e been using 2010 since it came out. Unfortunately there are more menus of crap to contend with and there are more bugs than in earlier versions. It works with XP64 - that's all I know.

 

[Will Rickards]

It doesn't prevent the computer from sleeping. In the middle of a backup. WTF?

 

[Mercutio]

Maybe try running the backup at a priority above idle?

 

[Bozo]

DiscWizard does, but Acronis True Image WD Edition couldn't care less about Seagate drives.

You need to have a WD drive somewhere in your system or it won't install. And it can't see the hard drives attached to a RAID controller.
Once installed though it is fine.

 

[LunarMist]

Since it is impossible to upgrade from Windows XP to 7, is it possible to sequentially upgrade from Windows XP to Vista to 7?

 

[Stereodude]

Yes, but I'm sure it's an absolutely horrific idea.

 

[ddrueding]

Yes, but I'm sure it's an absolutely horrific idea.

Seconded. Even if you were able to do it without any major stability or compatibility issues, I'm sure the result would be appreciably slower than a clean install.

 

[LunarMist]

OK. I thought it was a stretch. Hanging onto XP for dear life...

 

[Fushigi]

The Win7 copy arrived for my wife's laptop yesterday. If you don' recall, the laptop was bought when you could get the upgrade free. So, she's on Vista HP 64-bit and the Win7 is, of course, also HP 64-bit.

While I'm always a fan of doing a clean install, what are the opinions on doing a straight upgrade? Just pop in the Win7 disk and let it do an upgrade in place? Will the apps survive or need to be reloaded? That's my major pain point; installing Windows and restoring her data is easy enough but it's a PITA to re-install the apps.

The laptop is on our WHS so of course it's backed up. I can always try the upgrade-in-place first and backpedal to a clean install if that fails. But I'm sure she'd rather I minimize the upgrade downtime.

I also went through Disk Cleanup yesterday and purged about 40GB of crap from it. Freed up half the used space, which is amazing for a machine that's only a few months old.

 

[MaxBurn]

I would say that is a perfect candidate for the upgrade, you have your backup you can restore if anything isn't to your liking so why not give it a shot? Not really much to loose except an hour or three if you don't like what the upgrade did for you.

Only thing is what is that upgrade disk they gave you? Is it actually an OEM copy or maybe perhaps a proprietary HP restore disk with win7 for that machine? If you put the disk in does it give you the regular microsoft upgrade process or something from HP? I wouldn't put it past them to give you some bastardized restore disk.

 

[MaxBurn]

Side note: I noticed the Cisco VPN client on my new image that IT gave me is much more stable, not one problem. Version 5.05.0290, thank you someone for updating the D630 computer image. Not a chance in fricking hell that we can go past XP for a very long time though, ah well at least they pay me to deal with it.

 

[Fushigi]

I should have been clearer; the HP in my post was Home Premium and not Compaq's pimp. The laptop is a Sony Vaiaiaioiaoaiaoaiaio. It shipped with minimal crapware; just Sony tools for the webcam etc. which I kept and Norton which was promptly removed. If Sony mucked with the Win7 DVD, hopefully they didn't do too much to it. It actually came from a fulfillment joint & not Sony proper so it may be altogether clean.

I'll look at the disc when I get home this afternoon.

 

[Fushigi]

It's an Upgrade DVD, not OEM or anything else although it is co-branded with Sony & MS. There's a separate disc for the Sony-specific stuff. Their instructions say back up the machine & run the upgrade and that it will prompt to uninstall a couple of things on it's own. Time permitting I'll do the upgrade in the morning while my wife is at work.

 

[Stereodude]

So, I have 2 Desktop.ini files on my Desktop in Windows 7.



Can I safely delete them?

One contains:

[.ShellClassInfo]
LocalizedResourceName=@%SystemRoot%\system32\shell32.dll,-21769
IconResource=%SystemRoot%\system32\imageres.dll,-183

The other contains:

[.ShellClassInfo]
LocalizedResourceName=@%SystemRoot%\system32\shell32.dll,-21799
[LocalizedFileNames]
Acer Registration.lnk=@C:\Program Files (x86)\Acer\Registration\GlobalRegistrationMUI.dll,-101
Enregistrement Acer.lnk=@C:\Program Files (x86)\Acer\Registration\GlobalRegistrationMUI.dll,-101
Registrazione Acer.lnk=@C:\Program Files (x86)\Acer\Registration\GlobalRegistrationMUI.dll,-101
Registro de Acer.lnk=@C:\Program Files (x86)\Acer\Registration\GlobalRegistrationMUI.dll,-101
Acer Registratie.lnk=@C:\Program Files (x86)\Acer\Registration\GlobalRegistrationMUI.dll,-101
Acer Registrierung.lnk=@C:\Program Files (x86)\Acer\Registration\GlobalRegistrationMUI.dll,-101
Registo Acer.lnk=@C:\Program Files (x86)\Acer\Registration\GlobalRegistrationMUI.dll,-101
Registrering af Acer.lnk=@C:\Program Files (x86)\Acer\Registration\GlobalRegistrationMUI.dll,-101
Acer Rekisteröinti.lnk=@C:\Program Files (x86)\Acer\Registration\GlobalRegistrationMUI.dll,-101
Acer-registrering.lnk=@C:\Program Files (x86)\Acer\Registration\GlobalRegistrationMUI.dll,-101
Registrace Acer.lnk=@C:\Program Files (x86)\Acer\Registration\GlobalRegistrationMUI.dll,-101
Acer Εγγραφή.lnk=@C:\Program Files (x86)\Acer\Registration\GlobalRegistrationMUI.dll,-101
Acer Regisztráció.lnk=@C:\Program Files (x86)\Acer\Registration\GlobalRegistrationMUI.dll,-101
Rejestracja — Acer.lnk=@C:\Program Files (x86)\Acer\Registration\GlobalRegistrationMUI.dll,-101
Acer Kayıt.lnk=@C:\Program Files (x86)\Acer\Registration\GlobalRegistrationMUI.dll,-101
Înregistrare Acer.lnk=@C:\Program Files (x86)\Acer\Registration\GlobalRegistrationMUI.dll,-101
Регистрация Acer.lnk=@C:\Program Files (x86)\Acer\Registration\GlobalRegistrationMUI.dll,-101
Acer ユーザー登録.lnk=@C:\Program Files (x86)\Acer\Registration\GlobalRegistrationMUI.dll,-101
Acer 注册.lnk=@C:\Program Files (x86)\Acer\Registration\GlobalRegistrationMUI.dll,-101
Acer 註冊.lnk=@C:\Program Files (x86)\Acer\Registration\GlobalRegistrationMUI.dll,-101
Acer Registreerimine.lnk=@C:\Program Files (x86)\Acer\Registration\GlobalRegistrationMUI.dll,-101
Acer Registracija.lnk=@C:\Program Files (x86)\Acer\Registration\GlobalRegistrationMUI.dll,-101
Acer Reģistrācija.lnk=@C:\Program Files (x86)\Acer\Registration\GlobalRegistrationMUI.dll,-101
Acer Регистрация.lnk=@C:\Program Files (x86)\Acer\Registration\GlobalRegistrationMUI.dll,-101
การลงทะเบียน Acer.lnk=@C:\Program Files (x86)\Acer\Registration\GlobalRegistrationMUI.dll,-101
Acer تسجيل.lnk=@C:\Program Files (x86)\Acer\Registration\GlobalRegistrationMUI.dll,-101
Acer - Registrácia.lnk=@C:\Program Files (x86)\Acer\Registration\GlobalRegistrationMUI.dll,-101
Registracija Acer.lnk=@C:\Program Files (x86)\Acer\Registration\GlobalRegistrationMUI.dll,-101
Acer 등록.lnk=@C:\Program Files (x86)\Acer\Registration\GlobalRegistrationMUI.dll,-101

If I can't delete them, how can I get rid of them (without hiding OS / Protected files)?

 

[ddrueding]

IIRC, those regenerated on Vista as well.

 

[Stereodude]

So, what's the fix then?

 

[MaxBurn]

I didn't see anything negative from deleting those desktop.ini files, but I am one of those people that generally doesn't go for the customized stuff. I think all they do is hold info like view options or custom icons etc so nothing actually useful.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc144102(VS.85).aspx

 

[Fushigi]

.. There's a separate disc for the Sony-specific stuff. .. Time permitting I'll do the upgrade in the morning while my wife is at work.

2:05, so just over two hours, to do the upgrade including migrating the existing apps like Office & Firefox and data. System tray stuff like AVG, Logitech for her mouse, and the Xmarks widget for IE are all behaving normally. WiFi worked out of the gate. Everything seems to work OK & critical Windows updates have been installed.

Add another 1:20 to install the Sony-specific stuff which includes updates to WinDVDBD, system drivers, etc. 45 items but only one reboot when done.

The only "bad" thing Sony did was reset the wallpaper to a Vaio background. I changed that back to her normal wallpaper & enabled the wallpaper auto-change feature with a few other pics.

 

[Stereodude]

I didn't see anything negative from deleting those desktop.ini files, but I am one of those people that generally doesn't go for the customized stuff. I think all they do is hold info like view options or custom icons etc so nothing actually useful.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc144102(VS.85).aspx

Well FWIW, I deleted them and haven't noticed any changes, so I guess they weren't needed.

 

[MaxBurn]

2:05, so just over two hours, to do the upgrade including migrating the existing apps like Office & Firefox and data. System tray stuff like AVG, Logitech for her mouse, and the Xmarks widget for IE are all behaving normally. WiFi worked out of the gate. Everything seems to work OK & critical Windows updates have been installed.

Add another 1:20 to install the Sony-specific stuff which includes updates to WinDVDBD, system drivers, etc. 45 items but only one reboot when done.

The only "bad" thing Sony did was reset the wallpaper to a Vaio background. I changed that back to her normal wallpaper & enabled the wallpaper auto-change feature with a few other pics.

Any PA followers here?

Making this post from YYC which annoyingly now REQUIRES registration to use their "Free WIFI!" as long as they can now spam you to death. Thank god for a hotmail account I never use.

 

[Mercutio]

So far I've done one "big" migration of 14 systems in an insurance office to Windows 7.

They only use Office, a couple of tools to generate or edit PDFs and several web-based applications from the insurance networks they belong to (Farmer's et al), which bitch that they aren't using IE6 but seem to work fine in Firefox or IE8.

They're basically the ideal case for upgrading to a new version of Windows, since they have no real legacy apps.

 

[sechs]

Why did they upgrade?

 

[Mercutio]

Why did they upgrade?

Well, a couple of things happened. One is that they moved from having maybe OEM to Open Licensing, and from having some things that were of more than questionable legality (they had a lot of white boxes that used the old TPCRY serial number) to being entirely legal on software.

The other is that I basically promised the owner that I'd make his getting the next version of Windows a high priority during the conversation when I told him he needed to skip Vista.

And frankly, you would've done it too if you'd had someone basically begging you for 25 hours of labor billing.

 

[ddrueding]

The other is that I basically promised the owner that I'd make his getting the next version of Windows a high priority during the conversation when I told him he needed to skip Vista.

This is a big thing. I managed to prevent all my clients from going Vista, I never had to support it in an office. Even before 7 had come out I had clients asking when their conversion date was. That is when I get to sit down with the owner of a business and explain to them what a "business case" is, and that there isn't one for 7, either. If that doesn't convince them, I go on to talk about the costs in addition to the licenses; labor, hardware upgrades, training, and frankly, longer and more frequent service calls due to the OS being newer and the users not being as familiar.

MS missed the boat. They should have gone SaaS with XP; there just doesn't need to be another OS for anything more than security fixes and hardware support.

 

[Chewy509]

Well my work laptop is now running Windows 7 x64 Enterprise, w/Office 2007.

Still got to install all the other applications that I need, but for the time being it's all working fine.

I have already experienced 1 BSOD (cause unknown, it happened just after installing the Intel Display drivers, so may put it down to that), and have found 1 other interesting issue.

I have an external HDD caddy with a 500GB HDD partitioned into 2 partitions. If I connect the external HDD via USB, it sees both partitions in explorer as E: and F: drive.
If I connect via firewire, I only see E: and looking in disk management, the 2nd partition appears as not formatted!
The firewire chipset in the laptop is a Ricoh controller (as found in a HP 6710b laptop), and the external HDD has an Oxford 911 based controller.
If using the firewire connection under XP x86, XP x64 or Vista x64, they all see both partitions as formatted as NTFS and both are usable. Just not under Windows 7?

 

[Tannin]

An excellent and informative thread - I've been away from the web for the past month and due to pressing matters unrelated, effectively absent for about three months so I'm reading this as part of my crash-course introduction to Win7 - and one post stands out for me as containing THE key point:

Ultimately, I think it's the 4GB RAM limit of Windows XP that will finally push people and businesses to drop Windows XP.

Just so.

 

[Tea]

Quick lowdown required: what's the go with all those different Win7 versions? Looks to me as though there is no reason to get anything above the base version (if I can actually buy it, which is another question).

Which Win7 versions allow XP downgrade?

 

[Fushigi]

I don't think RAM requirements will do it at all. For instance, when my wife & I were shopping for laptops a couple of months ago, every consumer machine that was higher on the computing scale than a netbook had 3 or 4GB of RAM standard. Even among the business-oriented laptops that came with 2GB standard, like a build-your-own Sony I was looking at today, the cost to bump from 2 to 4GB is only about $20. RAM prices only became significant if you went for 6 or 8GB.

In fact, I don't really see hardware costs biasing anyone towards XP over Win7. Face it; computing power is just plain cheap nowadays. Sure, you can still build multi-thousand dollar rigs but the average business laptop has been getting cheaper while the specs have gotten better. A few years back our standard corporate laptop was around $1800-2000 for a Pentium M with 512MB RAM and a 40GB HD; now it's $1200 and has a dual-core CPU, 2GB RAM, a 60+GB HD, and it butters your toast in the morning.

Business will move to Win7 as part of their technology refresh program. When new machines are deployed they'll get the new OS. Some places, but hardly all, will also look at existing hardware and upgrade that.

Now, I don't think this will be quick. I doubt it will start in earnest for several months. Part is to let IT test the app suite against it (which they should have been doing with the RC). Another part is that upgrading existing machines takes time and time is money. And in the depression/recession/"these trying times" that money may simply not be available for refitting old machines.

Some have harped on retraining costs for people migrating from XP to 7. Yes, they are a little different, but my observation has been that they aren't that different for the average end user. My wife would fit that category. She surfs mostly and uploads & organizes photos. She goes into Word on occasion. If anything weird happens she calls me. She went from XP to her Vista laptop with no retraining whatsoever. From that to 7 was again a non-issue. She automatically took to the revamped task bar & hasn't asked me any significant questions about it.

Going from Office 2003 to Office 2007 is far more of a UI shock than XP to 7.

 

[Fushigi]

Quick lowdown required: what's the go with all those different Win7 versions? Looks to me as though there is no reason to get anything above the base version (if I can actually buy it, which is another question).

Which Win7 versions allow XP downgrade?

The multiple versions are to allow OEMs to tie specific Windows versions to specific machine niches. Netbooks get Win7 Starter. As the name implies it's a starter edition and has limitations imposed.

Home Premium should server for virtually all consumers.

Professional is for those who require RDP and XP downgrade rights. It also is the minimum version for XP mode (XP in a VM).

Ultimate is Professional + the ability to run in multiple languages and BitLocker disk encryption.

Link.

 

[MaxBurn]

This is the first I have heard of XP downgrade being legit from a win7 license, you all sure about that?

 

[Fushigi]

Found in the MS forums:

In the Microsoft Select License, Open License, Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM) License, and Full Packaged Product (FPP) License document dated June 2009 it states in the frequently asked questions section on page 3:

Can I downgrade my OEM version of Windows 7 Professional to Windows XP Professional?
For a limited time of 18 months after the general availability of Windows 7 or the release of a Windows 7 Service Pack, whichever is earlier, the OEM license of Windows 7 Professional and Windows 7 Ultimate will include downgrade rights to Windows XP Professional. After that period the OEM license will enable downgrade rights to Windows Vista Business."

 

[LunarMist]

How do you get XP then? Does the license code work with an OEM XP disc? Or does OEM here only mean Dell and HP, etc.? Should I just proceed to buy the Homeo Premium?

 

[LunarMist]

Oops. Oh Homeo, Homeo. Wherefore art thou Homeo?
BTW, where is good Mercutio?

 

[Fushigi]

How do you get XP then? Does the license code work with an OEM XP disc? Or does OEM here only mean Dell and HP, etc.? Should I just proceed to buy the Homeo Premium?

I believe you have to supply your own XP CD to downgrade. I've no idea how the licensing works but I'd imagine you would have to call the 800 number for MS licensing/activation and get them to issue you a downgrade code.

 

[Mercutio]

How do you get XP then? Does the license code work with an OEM XP disc? Or does OEM here only mean Dell and HP, etc.? Should I just proceed to buy the Homeo Premium?

You get XP in whatever way you already have XP. There's a phone number you can call and they provide you with a valid key (OEM for OEM etc). I think the presumption is that a Microsoft shop will already have discs floating around someplace.

 

[Mercutio]

BTW, where is good Mercutio?

I worked all weekend.

 

[LunarMist]

I have OEM XP SP2 CD, but I'm not a business. I'll get the Win 7 Home Premium. Have you any advice for the clueless user?

 

[LunarMist]

Is there anything special I should do before installing the Windows 7?