Helped parents install Windows 7 on their laptop yesterday, by which I mean my brother and I installed it and occasionally told parents useful things about it when they came past.
Things I like about it:
- Plug and Play is what it says. Printer worked, mouse worked, scanner had to be searched for but didn't take very long. Only thing we had some problems with was the ADSL USB modem, of which more later.
- Internet access via ad-hoc network worked straight away with no need to change settings - just plugged the ethernet cable into its network port and it picked up the network and was happy. (More on this later, though.)
- UAC much improved since Vista and Win2K8 Server - it's more akin to the popups that one of the spyware blockers I use has, which tell you when something is trying to install or run that you might not have expected.
In general it looks like the operating system's grown up and really quite nice.
The not-so-fun has been today's attempt to get our Thomson Speedtouch 330 USB ADSL modem playing nice with 64-bit Windows 7. There are no drivers for Windows 7 in general or the 64-bit version in particular; we made two initial attempts, first with the drivers that came with the product (no go) and second with the 32-bit Vista drivers (also no go). A
workaround on Technet looked promising but led to blue-screening every time we plugged the modem in.
Finally,
another workaround on Technet gave us a working setup and a connection that would actually work! Hurrah!
Except now the Win7 laptop can't see the internet connection through the network like it could before, and I have no idea how to sort this.
FAKE EDIT: Brother has copied over the settings we had on parents' old laptop (for when it was using Internet Connection Sharing) and applied them to the LAN connection on the new one and it works fine. Huzzah!
I still think things might have been easier with an ethernet-based ADSL modem/router, but at least the duct tape on this setup is now in all the right places. :)