Well this is my first post from a fresh install of Win7 RC 32bit on my laptop which is an ASUS PRO31P. Because I was having problems with Word 2007 that I couldn’t fix I was thinking of reinstalling Vista, but Win7 RC appeared at the same time so I thought what the hell. I did an upgrade install. The process was rather painless but it took several hours. In the end the machine booted without incident all I had to do was reactive my antivirus software Kaspersky 2009 and I was off.
The installer inspected my machine and identified three programs that I needed to uninstall prior to upgrade. One was a virtual CD Rom Magic ISO the other OCR software Finereader, I can’t recall the third but it must have been something that I was not using. After the install all my settings files etc were there including my cheesy background image.
Since I have had the laptop I have never been able to upgrade the graphics drivers (GEFORCE 7300) seems that neither NVIDIA nor ASUS had any particular interest in the graphics chipset for Vista. This has not been an issue as far as I was concerned with the exception trying to run Google Sketch Up. As soon as the machine was running I tried this program and too my amazement it ran without incident. There had been a Google workaround which I had to use to fire this application up on every occasion. This was with the Geforce Go 7300 driver that was in the installation package! There was more and update for the video driver as well. The only other issue was running Pinnacle Studio 12 this did not seem to fire up readily and when it did the GUI seemed screwed up. I was able to run this in Vista SP2 mode (interesting as Vista SP2 isn’t generally available) and seems to be OK but I have not extensively tested it yet.
I have been running Win 7 Beta on A Pentium 4 machine since it arrived and this did increase my confidence to install the release candidate. I have been underwhelmed rather than disappointed with Windows Vista so a move was on the cards. However I do think that my next laptop will be a MacBook as we already own one have had no problems to speak of with it. Then again Win7 may put all that to rest.