Windows 7, Vista & XP Machines

Well I have my Windows 7 RC1 test machine setup – it’s a 64-bit machine instead of a 32-bit.

There is NO UPGRADE path from an XP machine to Windows 7, so you will need to do a clean install……this means that you had better back up all of your data to an external source and I mean ALL of your data, your Word files, your Excel files, your pdf’s any document you’ve ever downloaded from the internet that you would “die” without; because a clean install will erase everything from your hard drive.

Aren’t I just the bearer of good news?  NOT!

But there is more…..

While the installation of Windows 7 was quick and painless all was not joyful.

I have a Samsung SyncMaster 213T Monitor (one of the really cool ones that you can pivot so that you can look at your monitor in Portrait rather than Landscape mode) well the monitor works, but the pivot ability doesn’t anymore and Samsung hasn’t updated the drivers and probably won’t.  So bye-bye pivot feature 🙁

My next “unjoyful” discovery is that Windows 7 doesn’t recognize the XP machines in our network AND our XP machines don’t recognize the Windows 7 machine.

Moral of this section of the story is – Windows 7 doesn’t play nice!  And if you have a computer network that includes XP machines don’t expect your network to work like it used to and be prepared to replace your XP machines if you want to continue to work in a networked environment.

Ok, the good news (if you can call it that) is that Windows 7 recognizes my Vista Business Ultimate laptop and the laptop also recognizes the Windows 7 machine.  So far, I haven’t really done much to check out how well they network – that’ will be next week so stay tuned.

More bad news…..as of yet, I cannot get Windows 7 to recognize either my LexMark T644 B&W duplexer printer OR my LexMark C524 Color Laser Printer – I’m sure that is mostly because both of those printers are connected to my XP machine and “shared”.

I was able to install my Cannon Pixma MX330 Multi(dys)functional printer and I can print from Windows 7!  Wooo-hooooo!

The other interesting thing about Windows 7 is that in addition to allowing you to store things in Folders, you now also have Libraries.  Gonna have to give me a day or two to figure that one out, but jeeze how many ways do you need to store your documents?

Ok, that’s it for now, stay tuned as I’ll be doing frequent (can’t guarantee daily) updates.