In the last couple of weeks I have been using Windows 7. Thanks to being a student and an associating between MSDN and our school we have access to download the OS and take it for a spin. I installed Windows 7 on a Dell Latitude E6500 with an 80 gb hard drive and 2 gb of ram. I downloaded the ISO file and burned it to a DVDRAM disk with iamgeburn which is a free image burning utility. The install process took about the same amount of time as any other OS. During the disk partition selection process I carved up my hard disk into two separate partitions so that I can dual boot Windows 7 and XP professional or Linux depending on what strikes my fancy later on.
I was very impressed with the install process which gave me no problems to mention. All of the drivers for my E6500 were found and I have been running Windows 7 without any incidents. I was highly impressed that the Cisco VPN client for Vista installed and worked with no problems. I installed Office 2007 , MIRC and several other programs that ran just fine. Windows 7 has the same look and feel of Vista but I have to admit that it runs much better. One of the features that I like on the start button is the ability to type the name of the program and it will give you a selection of applications you can click on. Another program that I love is the Snippet Tool which is similar to SnagIT 8. The Snippet Tool allows you to take a screen shot of any portion of your sreeen that you want. This is a very useful tool if you are doing any kind of documentation and you need to show people screen shots of what you are talking about.
Today I had a break in the action so I made the mistake of installing Windows XP Professional SP3 on the second partition of my hard drive. Everything went just fine and then the laptop rebooted. Windows XP came up just fine but access to Windows 7 was gone. POOF!! Luckily for me I had not mistakenly overwritten the wrong partition during the install phase. I installed XP to the second partition but I guess that XP overwrote the boot.ini file and replaced it with one for itself. Needless to say I was a bit panicked after all the hours I spent installing software and configuring Windows 7 to be my primary OS. I did what I always do when I have a technical problem and I started surfing the Net on the different techie forums looking for the answer. I found a lot of information however I did not find the answer I was looking for. I fixed the problem by booting the laptop to the Windows 7 install media and it gave me the option to repair Windows. Repair windows had five or six options and one of them was to fix the boot up process. BINGO!! I selected that option and a dos prompt popped up in the bottom left portion of the screen and it magically fixed the issue. I rebooted the laptop and now Windows 7 is once again available to me.
I still want to dual boot another OS with Windows 7 so I will have to do some research on HOW to do this and then I will let you know what I find out.
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