My Windows 7 Beta Installation Experience

It all started on Friday when I first tried to download the ISO image from the Microsoft Partner Site. Let me start off saying that I received an Email from Microsoft last week that stated that the download would be made available on 1/9/2009 at 12 PM PST. I was there at the Ready at 3 PM EST and all of the download icons were grayed out.

I first went into the MS Partner's Forums and saw that I was not the only person that was experiencing the same issue. Someone at the Forum provided the direct link to the Public's download location but it got me nowhere because millions of people were trying to download this new software package at the same time. I believe that Microsoft was overwhelmed.

I then decided to pick up the telephone and call the Partner Help Desk and they stated that their Email to Partners was an error and that the download would not become available until Monday, 1/12/2009. I, of course, did not believe this and said thank you, hung up, added this information to the Partners Forum, and continued attempting to get the download to work from both the Partner's Site and the Public download area.

On Saturday night/Sunday morning, finally, the Partner's Web Site made the download available. I successfully downloaded the new ISO image to my Laptop and used Roxio 2009 to create a new DVD.

I had every intention of firing up an old PC, that I have upstairs in my spare room (office), to house this new Operating System. Over the weekend different people on the Geeks Website had mentioned an easy way to make a PC Dual Boot. I decided to try this Dual Boot Configuration. I have a Dell XPS Media Center PC with the XP Media Center Operating System running in my Living Room. I had acquired this machine from a customer who had purchased an Apple Laptop for their daughter. The customer had many issues with this machine because the daughter had gone to many Web Sites that infested the PC with Spyware. When I had first brought it home I cleaned it up but also found that it needed a new Power Supply. So, I did purchase and replace this Power Supply.

Anyway, I had an old copy of Partition Magic 8.0 (from before Symantec had acquired the Power Quest Corporation) and attempted to shrink the C: Partition so that I could have about 30 GB of space for Windows 7. Every time that I tried to change the size of the volume it would just stop after reaching about 20%. I finally saw an error code of 1513. I looked this number up on Symantec's Web Site and it told me to run a CHKDSK C: /F to fix this error. The first time that I tried this fix the top of the CHKDSK Screen stated that the Volume was Dirty. I ran CHKDSK C: /F a few times and finally it came back fine but still Partition Magic failed to run passed 20%. These actions took me to the wee hours of Sunday Night/Monday Morning.

Before I went to sleep I had decided to remove a Hard Drive from a machine that I had upstairs and just add it as a Slave Drive to the XPS machine. When I woke up this morning, before coffee, I took out the Hard Drive and brought it downstairs to the XPS machine. I had my coffee and then opened up the machine. I could not believe it. The XPS machine had a SATA Drive installed with no IDE connections for the Drive that I made available.

I then looked at Pricewatch.com and found prices for a new SATA Drive and drove to a local PC Store to purchase one. Since, I am a frequent customer at this store the owner usually gives me a break on the price. I came back home and installed the new 500 GB Drive and proceeded to start the installation (finally).

Of course with Murphy's Law still intact the installation failed. I looked up the error code and it stated that I should remake the DVD at a slower rate.

I also decided, on my own, to re-download the ISO image and also to create the DVD using the same machine that I was going to perform the installion onto.

OK, this did take a bit of time to complete successfully but I now have a machine with the Windows 7 up and running.

Oh, BTW, I also found out that McAfee AV will not install on the Windows 7 Operating System. I followed the links given on the Windows 7 Desktop and they pointed me to AVG, Kapersky, and Norton. All three of these cost money. I knew that there was a Free Version of AVG so I decided to try it. AVG Free is now installed and working.