Setting Up Windows 7 Beta On Dell M4400

Windows 7 Beta I’ve decided to go for the Windows 7 beta on my new Dell M4400 due to the problems I got with the 64-bit Vista on it. Several blue screens and the most annoying audio stutter made me make up my mind. I must say I got some help from the pro support in the US (the Swedish support people didn’t get back to me at all), and after upgrading and rolling back several drivers things got a bit better, but not perfect.

So, I downloaded Win 7 Beta from my MSDN subscription, build 7000, and the installation went super. I think it took 18 minutes from start to stop. No issues at all.

I’m writing this blog post as a log for future re-installs so that I’m not forgetting anything the next time.

  • Screen drivers - Windows Update took care of updating the screen drivers, so I’m on Glass now, and graphics seems to be very responsive. Nice.
  • Anti Virus - McAfee VirusScan Enterprise 8.7i installed nice and seems to run just perfect.
  • ISO Mounting – I usually run Deamon Tools, but people are reporting issues with it so I went for another tool – Virtual CloneDrive. It’s free and has been serving me well on Win 7 so far!
  • Office stuff – Installed Office 2007, OneNote and proofing tools (couldn’t activate Office because I’ve been installing it too many times apparently, duh! A phone call took care of that)
  • Dev stuff – VisualStudio 2008 installed without any problems at all.
  • Chat – For some reason I could not install the latest Live Messenger via the Live installer tool, so I had to download Live Messenger 8 and it seems to work fine.
  • Backup – HomeServer Connector installed just fine. I still haven’t backed it up yet, but I will do that later today once I got a few more programs installed.

Todo:

  • Dev tools for VisualStudio – ReSharper, TestDriven.NET
  • Dev tools in general – NUnit, Common Service Locator, NHibernate.*, Unity, EntLib… + a bunch more. I have to look at my old laptop to see what I’m missing.
  • Live Sync
  • Etc.

There must be a way to automate all this?! I’m sure I’ve heard something on Hanselminutes about that. I’ll make sure I keep the downloads on my server so I don’t have to do that all over again.

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