Windows 7

mrpacs said:
I would have to agree. Funny thing is since Thursday everyone has almost completely forgotten about Vista, lol.
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Like I've always said I never understood all the hate for Vista, it worked fine for me and as we all know W7 is what vista SHOULD have been.
 
v1ru5 said:
Like I've always said I never understood all the hate for Vista, it worked fine for me and as we all know W7 is what vista SHOULD have been.
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And it will continue working great for me until I replace my computers! I actually canceled my Win7 preorder after I decided that I really don't want to reload my computers. They both work fine so there was no real benefit in upgrading to Win7. I'll upgrade when I'm ready to build a new desktop or buy another laptop.

And without two years of Vista under their belts, MS could not have done so well with Win7. There is no substitute for two years of use by the general public to really wring out a new OS.
 
Clean install from Upgrade work-around!

I was so hoping to have better news to share, but with all the conflicting reports and my own troubles testing this while on the road, it's been a messy 24 hours. However, after staying up late last night and working through a few different scenarios, I think I do have a (fairly) simple way to clean install Windows 7 with Upgrade media. That is, it should be easier than the old "install it twice" hack that I previously documented for Vista (though that should still work as well).

Put simply, the goal here is to clean install Windows 7 on a virgin, unused PC. You can boot and run Setup with the Upgrade media for Windows 7, but when you go to activate, it won't work.

Thanks to Kevin Fisher and a bit of testing, I have a simple workaround that does work.

After performing the clean install, ensure that there are no Windows Updates pending that would require a system reboot. (You'll see an orange shield icon next to Shutdown in the Start Menu if this is the case).

Then, open regedit.exe with Start Menu Search and navigate to:

HKLM/Software/Microsoft/Windows/CurrentVersion/Setup/OOBE/

Change MediaBootInstall from "1" to "0".

Open the Start Menu again and type cmd to display a shortcut to the Command Line utility. Right-click this shortcut and choose "Run as administrator." Handle the UAC prompt.

In the command line window, type: slmgr /rearm

Then tap ENTER, close the command line window and reboot. When Windows 7 reboots, run the Activate Windows utility, type in your product key and activate windows.

Voila!

A couple of notes here.

Others have reported that simply installing Windows 7 using Upgrade Media and then activating just works. It certainly doesn't hurt to try this, but my guess is that there was a version of Windows on the hard drive that Setup detected, thus making the install and activation work properly.

I have not tested this yet, but I assume if you launch Setup from within your previous version of Windows, choose Custom, reboot, and then wipe out the previous Windows version during Setup, that that will work as well.

And I'm just about positive that the old "install twice" hack from Vista will work too.

I will test all of this thoroughly when I get home. But for now I wanted to cut through the baloney and cut and paste jobs out there and give you something that really does work.

Again, thanks very much to Kevin for this information.
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http://community.winsupersite.com/b...-windows-7-with-upgrade-media-the-answer.aspx
 
mrpacs said:
I would have to agree. Funny thing is since Thursday everyone has almost completely forgotten about Vista, lol.
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Isn't that the true, not peep! :)

v1ru5 said:
Like I've always said I never understood all the hate for Vista, it worked fine for me and as we all know W7 is what vista SHOULD have been.
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I never understood it either, but there were folks who had never used it that hated it. I just didn't get that. The hate buzz seem to catch on for whatever reason and MS could never get Vista beyond it.
 
DAB said:
Isn't that the true, not peep! :)



I never understood it either, but there were folks who had never used it that hated it. I just didn't get that. The hate buzz seem to catch on for whatever reason and MS could never get Vista beyond it.
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You don't think there were actual Vista users that really didn't like the OS????????? I'm one of them. M$ has done well with "7".
 
mrpacs said:
You don't think there were actual Vista users that really didn't like the OS????????? I'm one of them. M$ has done well with "7".
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He didn't say that. He just said that there were people who never used it but still hated it.
 
Biaviian said:
He didn't say that. He just said that there were people who never used it but still hated it.
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I know one guy who is still afraid to upgrade to xp from 98. He doesn't want to "deal with all the headaches". he's also a Vista hater who has never used it and was shocked when I told him that I use it on two machines and think it's great.

I'd guess that most of the initial vista headaches were to do incompatibility with third party software and hardware, not necessarily with the OS itself. I think this new MS philosophy of working with third party manufacturers early in the game is a VERY good thing for us users.
 
mrpacs said:
You don't think there were actual Vista users that really didn't like the OS????????? I'm one of them. M$ has done well with "7".
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Biaviian said:
He didn't say that. He just said that there were people who never used it but still hated it.
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You are correct that is EXACTLY what I was saying and Proper's post belove proves my point. The fact is if Vista was setup properly it really isn't that different than Win 7. We do know Win 7 has been tweaked for better performance and they made some minor GUI changes. I am sure there are some that actualy used it that didn't like it, but based on my experience I'd likely think their reasons are pretty weak.

I have encountered many folks that would start telling me how much they hated Vista and when I asked them for specifics, then I'd hear, well I really never had it on my computer because of everything I've heard! OH Okay, so you really don't know then, you are just repeating crap.

Believe me Vista had its problems, it was initially very slow, they tweaked it with the first SP. Coping files from between hard drives or even USB cards was horribly slow. It was also incompatible with a lot of hardware, which MS finally learned a lesson on. None the less by the last SP it ran pretty darn well. On my work notebook I really couldn't have lived with it, but since I like to keep the latest OS, I updated to Win 7, but Vista worked GREAT!

ProperModulation said:
I know one guy who is still afraid to upgrade to xp from 98. He doesn't want to "deal with all the headaches". he's also a Vista hater who has never used it and was shocked when I told him that I use it on two machines and think it's great.
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Yes that is what I am talking about most of the time its just a bunch of nonsense that has been repeated over and over.
 
The biggest difference that I've noticed between Vista and "7", (outside of the obvious GUI improvements), is the way that "7" is installed/configured and setup initially. Setting up 7 is a breeze! "7" found all my internal and external devices without me ever having to load any 3rd party drivers. Vista was not able to do this for me. Being a computer builder, this is a HUGE improvement.
 
mrpacs said:
The biggest difference that I've noticed between Vista and "7", (outside of the obvious GUI improvements), is the way that "7" is installed/configured and setup initially. Setting up 7 is a breeze! "7" found all my internal and external devices without me ever having to load any 3rd party drivers. Vista was not able to do this for me. Being a computer builder, this is a HUGE improvement.
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That would be correct, but the fact is most Windows in the past were a pain in the ass to setup. You take XP, my gosh there were hardly ever any drivers built into it and you had to install drivers for everything. Yet folks did this and once they did it was a good OS. I say Vista was the same. It seems because it was a pain in the ass to setup this was a reason not to like it. XP was not different in my opinion in terms of setting it up.

Win 7 is a huge improvement on many fronts! MS finally got one right in my book!
 
mrpacs said:
The biggest difference that I've noticed between Vista and "7", (outside of the obvious GUI improvements), is the way that "7" is installed/configured and setup initially. Setting up 7 is a breeze! "7" found all my internal and external devices without me ever having to load any 3rd party drivers. Vista was not able to do this for me. Being a computer builder, this is a HUGE improvement.
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Good observation, I didn't even notice that.
 
DAB said:
That would be correct, but the fact is most Windows in the past were a pain in the ass to setup. You take XP, my gosh there were hardly ever any drivers built into it and you had to install drivers for everything. Yet folks did this and once they did it was a good OS. I say Vista was the same. It seems because it was a pain in the ass to setup this was a reason not to like it. XP was not different in my opinion in terms of setting it up.

Win 7 is a huge improvement on many fronts! MS finally got one right in my book!
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I should clarify my post by adding that in some, not all cases, there weren't ANY Vista drivers available for certain peripheral devices - PERIOD. I haven't had this occur in XP. First impressions go a long way with some people in life and in computing and Vista just doesn't give a good first impression.
 
That isn't M$'s fault. That is the fault of the vendors. Some vendors (like TI) refused to make drives for Vista after they agreed to do that.
 
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