Friday Muse: Windows 7 - I’m Buying In…

I have to tell you that after the release of Windows Vista and all of the ensuing problems – I was more than a little skeptical when Windows 7 was released. All of the rumors of incompatible hardware and software, lofty system requirements, no direct migration from Windows XP were my main concerns, just to name a few. Basically, I suspected that once again Microsoft may have laid and egg wrt it’s desktop operating system, so I moved forward very cautiously. The Deerfield offices would just have to live on XP for awhile longer.

I am a very mobile person, and as such have a number of laptops in my life. My “MO” so far in my professional life has been to leave a breadcrumb trail of laptop computers in various places that I frequent. This for me has been a little more convenient than dragging around the ultimate “power portable” everywhere I go. What this means however, is that I have laptops that are still in service that I purchased in 2002 and are based upon the Pentium 4 and Celeron processors with 512MB to 1GB of RAM. So – relative to Windows 7, if the hardware compatibility wasn't an issue the processor power and RAM was.

So – I was at a point with a couple of the machines thinking that they were ready for the recycling center. Running XP is almost not-serviceable on these machines any more – even with the OS’s pared down to the bare minimum. The reason is because XP has been service patched so many times over its life time by MS, that just the bare vanilla OS with an anti-virus installed practically consumes all of the system resources, and basically results in a slow pig of a machine.

Having nothing to lose and also as a result of some positive experiences with other machines of a little better capability, I decided to try loading Windows 7 on these 2 particular machines just for grins. To my surprise, even the Celeron with 512MB performs fairly well! One thing that I am geeked about is that Windows 7 (and Vista before it) has a feature called “ReadyBoost” that allows you to use an inexpensive USB drive as a virtual cache, that helps speed up machines with limited RAM installed (btw – the 512MB machine and the 1GB machine were at their memory maximum, so their RAM could not be expanded). I purchased 2 Kingston 8GB USB drives for about $24 a piece from the local Kmart, and plugged them into both of these machines.

Just so you know – I installed Windows 7 Enterprise N on these machines form our MSDN subscription. Once the initial install was completed it was onto the hardware drivers issues. Guess what? with little effort both machines work in full screen resolution, and all drives, network, wireless, ports, and panel controls work. This was almost unbelievable considering neither manufacturer has Windows Vista, or Windows 7 drivers available for these machines. However some of the devices did not come to life until after the first time I ran Windows Update on them. So – basically on stock drivers provided by MS – these old boat anchors are working fairly well! What I did lose on both machines was the ability to put them in “sleep” mode. They will shutdown properly, and can also be hibernated - I am sure this has something to do with the implementation of ACPI in these machines. To be quite honest – sleep never worked properly with XP on them either. But – I thought that it was a small price to pay for another breath of life into these machines that were about to be set out to pasture.

One more thing – I was not able to “upgrade” windows, but had to perform a “custom installation” which is basically a clean install with the exception that your existing data and folders are intact with the exception of your old Windows folder structure that get renamed to Windows.old.

So – if you have some old machines in your life that are at least P4/Celeron or above and you feel adventurous, give it a go! you might actually be pleased with the result. MS has made me a believer in Windows again. Here’s the hoot. I’m actually writing this from a car dealership waiting lobby on my MacBook Pro via a Remote Desktop connection to a machine at the office so I can access Windows Live Writer (the best offline blogging tool PC, or Mac). You got all of that right?

Windows 7 - It was my idea ;)