Ok, I know I don't update this very frequently, but let's face it, I don't have a massive readership anyway, so I don't think I'm disappointing anyone there really. But what I do find disappointing is the fact that I started attempting to install Windows 7 in April, and now, in June, it is working.
The installation process was identical to the RC. I followed my own instructions to install drivers etc, and I have to say that my original impressions based on the release candidate are ... identical to my initial impressions of the SP1 release. That has to be testament to the programmers at MS - they actually released a good product at sp1, but better than that, it was good before release, and they must have had to change very little.
After minimal frustration I was up an running with 7 on my HP TC1100. I even got access to my Apple Time Capsule disk from within windows, something I had previously been unable to do on any windows machine (contact the person who administers your network, fuck you I am the admin.). Greedily, I tried to combat the one remaining limitation that TC1100 users struggle with world-wide, the bios limitation that prevents Windows from using anything past 128gb of HD space.
This problem is old and as the TC1100 is also old, it suffers from this problem. What it means is that if your OS refers to a sector on the disk that is further than 137,000,000 kB from the boot sector, it reads the disk starting again from zero, and so fucks your shit up big time. Long story short, you MUST partition your HDD to a maximum size of 125GB before you install an OS or else the thing will shit the bed after you have been using it for a while. My problem was, I thought that having a 250gb HDD and only using 125GB of it was not acceptable (the officer of the watch shall not tolerate defects) and read somewhere that I could get around it by partitioning and formatting the other half of the drive using G-Parted, or Mac OSX or whatever.
Then the fun started. Yes, you can partition leaving the first part untouched. But it seems the TC100 won't boot if there is a partition affter the 137KKKB sector, so it shit the bed anyway and I couldn't boot into windows, not even safe mode. No worries, I thought. I'll just make an image of the partion and re-burn it after re-formatting.
Occaisionally in life you have these moments when you realise you have just done something really really dumb. Like COLOSOLLY dumb. Like, pick up an baking tray without an oven mit because the baking looks like it might burn if you leave it in there another second, dumb. Like, realising you should not have attempted that jump as you fall over the handle bars of your bike and land on your face, dumb.
As I clicked [Yes, I am sure I want to delete this partition] I realised that this was one of those moments.
Here are a few reasons why this was epically dumb:
- I could have just deleted the new partition, leaving this old one untouched.
- If you make an image in Mac OSX, you need to write it with the same,
- Mac OSX cannot write to NTFS.
- It was not broken, so why the fuck was I trying to fix it in the first place?
Anyway, having done this epically dumb thing, I went about trying different was of making Windows try to recognise the full size of the disk. and short of implanting a special kind of boot-kit from Western Digital, I realised it was useless. I gave in, reformatted, after nearly breaking the bus pins on the HDD because it had been taken out and re-installed so many times, and reinstalled windows.
I should add at this point that my copy of Win 7 is upgrade only, so you must install a previous version on Windows first before it will work. For me this meant installing XP Tablet edition with its thousand extra little packs and add-ons and generally taking about 4 hours to instal. Install AVG, install the ethernet driver, and then install windows 7 including downloading updates. Then another 4 hours to install Windows 7, install updates, AV, Office, etc etc etc. Each time (I did this three times) I would have to spread the process out over several days as I was working such long hours I could not attend my poor wee tablet during the process.
After realising that it wasn't going to work I went back to the way it was originally, nearly a month later by this stage, and now I am back where I started, except it's not connected to the Time Capsule disk, and I have for some very strange reason, decided that I will use every piece of MS software I can, AV, ie8, if it doesn't actually cost me anything, I am using it. And to be honest, I don't mind it too much.
So I will say it again, though I still consider myself a Mac user, I do like Windows 7. It is fast, good looking, easy to use, and when you are connected to the net its features like driver updates work really, really well. I have not had to scrounge an old cd to install drivers, not even for my weather station's usb>serial converter.
Nothing.
It all just works.
Now if I can just get the BIOS to recognise the full size of the disk...
