www.nickhodge.com

• I down­loaded both the 32-bit and 64-bit ver­sions of the pub­lic beta
• Installed the 32-bit ver­sion of Win­dows 7 into Vir­tual PC
• Installed the 64-bit ver­sion of Win­dows 7 into Sun’s Vir­tual Box 2.1 (of which I am a fan)
• Installed the 64-bit ver­sion into a new par­ti­tion on my Dell XPS1330
• On the Dell, after the first boot into the explorer, Win­dows 7 gathered some more drivers to ensure the inbuilt web­cam and NVidia drivers were installed
• Inter­net Explorer 8 renders fast. Very fast.
• Our home wire­less net­work was found quickly; and work­ing after apply­ing key
• Office 2007 installed (+post-install updates) and Office Com­mu­nic­ator (work VoIP, chat)
• Win­dows Live soft­ware installed perfectly
• I can remote desktop from my primary work­sta­tion to Win­dows 7
• Other essen­tials to be installed and con­figured on Dell XPS 1330 for daily use
  • Visual Stu­dio 2008 (why not 2010? Edge releases + Edge releases is no longer stand­ing on the edge of one cliff, you are on a precipice)
  • Live Mesh. I’ve read on twit­ter this is coming.
  • Apple iTunes (you down­load the full 64-bit cli­ent and install: this is in the Readme)
  • Microsoft Expres­sion stuff
  • Win­dows Home Server con­nector for backup
  • AVG Free for anti-virus
  • VPN + Smart­card drivers
  • Join cor­rect work domain
  • Tel­stra NextG Inter­net access
  • Google Chrome
  • Text edit­ors, FTP cli­ent (Filezilla)
• Things to test out:
  • Xbox/Media Cen­ter con­nect­ors with DIVX codecs [deferred at the XBox has RRoD’d on me, now send off to Microsoft for rest, recre­ation and repair]

Updates, 12^th Janu­ary 2009

• Chrome on Win­dows 7: small com­mand line change at launch, and it works.
• Win­dows Home Server soft­ware installed first time.

Updates, 13^th Janu­ary 2009

• Took Dell XPS 1330 (and acci­dently left the thing at my desk, don’t ask how I did that!) to work and joined the Microsoft domain. Done. Down­loaded some other bits and pieces ready to install
• Under VPC at home: Installed the VPC addi­tions to provide mouse in/out and other nifty tools. Note: ensure you have Vir­tu­alPC 7 SP1 installed, and the addi­tions will work.
• Tim Sneath’s THE BUMPER LIST OF WINDOWS 7 SECRETS has 30 secrets that will make Win­dows 7 rock
• It is get­ting to a point where I will be run­ning Win­dows 7 nat­ive, and Vista under VPC for extreme edge case applic­a­tions. Wow. This is only a beta.

Updates, 15^th Janu­ary 2009

• Once con­nec­ted to internal net­work with a fresh-restart, Microsoft IT login scripts auto­mat­ic­ally installed the latest Anti-virus software.
• XPS had a BIOS Upgrade for some reason: done (now A15)
• Live Mesh cli­ent updated today: installed and work­ing; applied appro­pri­ate dir­ect­or­ies into my mesh.
• Ultra-surprisingly, my USB Smart­card reader just installed and worked first time.
• Microsoft VPN con­nec­tion soft­ware installed and worked first time
• Installed Palm Treo as a sync device. Tell Treo to “setup PC on next con­nec­tion”, down­loaded latest soft­ware, recon­nect Treo, device drivers installed and Win­dows Mobile Device Centre does the rest. That is, it worked first time.
• Adobe Mas­ter Col­lec­tion CS4: Just installing InDes­ign CS4 and Pho­toshop CS4 with Open­Type fonts (for some later test­ing). Avoid­ing Acrobat Pro­fes­sional as this usu­ally mucks around with too much oper­at­ing sys­tem guts: installing printer drivers and add-ins to MSOf­fice apps. [note: please con­sult Adobe on their formal pos­i­tion on Win­dows 7!]
• Visual Stu­dio 2007 Pro­fes­sional. The big daddy. done, and work­ing! Need to install the other bits like F# etc etc.

Updates, 19^th Janu­ary 2009

• Win­dows Media Cen­ter has changed in Win­dows 7, and it happened that I had a spare AVER­me­dia ExpressCard/34. The drivers were not a part of Win­dows 7, so off to the Dell down­loads. Installed the Vista drivers; and re-inserted the card. After point­ing Win­dows 7 to the x64 drivers: installed! Win­dows Media Cen­ter launched; scan for DVB-T on the small anten­nae: and we have it installed. Includ­ing get­ting the ABC instream
• Installed the cur­rent Microsoft builds of Office Com­mu­nic­ator 2007 and LiveMeet­ing 2007. OK, tested and work­ing in production.
• Send Feed­back actu­ally worked for me today. Shock hor­ror. Accord­ing to the engin­eer­ing team: for feed­back to work, you need to ensure your Win­dows 7 Beta is activ­ated.
• iTunes installed; but hav­ing dif­fi­culty telling iTunes that it’s music is on the other Vista par­ti­tion (E:\) rather than the default C:\. Prob­ably user-error.  (yes, user error: fixed in 22 Janu­ary update)

Updates, 22^nd Janu­ary 2009

• Big­pond NextG USB installed and work­ing with x64 Vista drivers, and cre­at­ing a simple dial-out con­nec­tion (hint: dial *99***1# ; user­name: youraccountname@bigpond.com). In other words, just like Vista x64, I am avoid­ing the Tel­stra Big­pond con­nec­tion manager.
• iTunes: needed to recre­ate the Lib­rary, with the Preferences>Advanced, Music Folder Loc­a­tion set to the external source. New Lib­rary is cre­ated, point­ing to the loc­a­tion (there­fore: no copy­ing of music/video to your install drive)
• Tor­toise SVN 1.5.6 installed. Needed for Iron­Py­thon and Witty builds. Next step is Git for Iron­Ruby source code access
• Updated/changed to Win­dows Mobile Device Centre 6.1 which seemed to cor­rect speed of access to my Treo Pro.

Needs Fix­ing (have repor­ted these)

• Bluetooth not seen by Win­dows 7, although activ­ated on XPS1330. Drivers installed, but no go. Prob­ably some­thing in my hard­ware configuration?
• The Intel Wire­less Link 4965AGN driver seems to stall Shut­down (not sleep) and when wak­ing from sleep, fails to cor­rectly wake the card. Can­not disable/renable to get DHCP. Solu­tion is a com­plete reboot. Drivers on Dell site are circa late 2007. Prob­ably a driver issue in the cur­rent Win­dows 7 beta?