Just loaded Windows 7 on my laptop & I reacon I get an extra 30% life out of my battery than when it was running Vista. This means I approximately only have to charge it twice for every three times I was charging it when running Vista!
Got to thinking about the environmental impact of Vista and its power hungry behaviour on all the PCs in the World - Microsoft should make sure it thinks about this every time it refreshes its software and take responsibility.
Friday 4 September 2009
Wednesday 2 September 2009
Windows 7 system recovery
Having successfully upgrading my laptop to run Windows 7 I was in the process of installing my applications when unfortunately towards the end of the list I installed something that broke my installation resulting in a blue screen of death every time I boot the system.
I restarted my machine and gratefully accepted Windows offer to attempt to fix my machine. After much whirring Windows 7 restarted and hey presto I could log in again - fantastic!
Actually not quite so fantastic as I had hoped, as it turned out that the recovery process had uninstalled the majority of the applications I had previously installed successfully.
This included Office 2007 which I had activated. When I tried to reactivate having reinstalled I was told that I needed to ring Microsoft as I had exceeded my number of activations - hmmm, not such a smart recovery process.
My advice would be not to activate anything after a Windows 7 install, until you are happy that everything is loaded and working ok.
Wonder if creating numerous restore points would have helped ...
AB
I restarted my machine and gratefully accepted Windows offer to attempt to fix my machine. After much whirring Windows 7 restarted and hey presto I could log in again - fantastic!
Actually not quite so fantastic as I had hoped, as it turned out that the recovery process had uninstalled the majority of the applications I had previously installed successfully.
This included Office 2007 which I had activated. When I tried to reactivate having reinstalled I was told that I needed to ring Microsoft as I had exceeded my number of activations - hmmm, not such a smart recovery process.
My advice would be not to activate anything after a Windows 7 install, until you are happy that everything is loaded and working ok.
Wonder if creating numerous restore points would have helped ...
AB
Installing Windows 7 RTM on a Sony Vaio VGN FW
This post provides a record of what steps I had to go through in order to get Windows 7 Ultimate running successfully on a Sony Vaio VGN-FW21E. I imagine it would be a similar experience for all the models found in the VGN range.
When I bought the Sony, Vista Home came preinstalled, and while the machine has been relatively stable I was underwhelmed by general performance and battery life. It has a P8400 processor and 4GB RAM so I was working on the basis that the hardware was not to blame and that Windows 7 should improve the user experience.
Step #1 : Create a Sony recovery DVD set (2DVDs)
You never know what will happen when you have reformatted your hard drive, so it's good to have this safety net. Unfortunately Sony provide all the hardware drivers and applications in a .MOD format, which means that us mere mortals will effectively be starting from scratch when the base Operating System is changed.
Step #2 : Buy a new hard drive (optional)
I took the view that hard drives are cheap and that I wanted all of my data (photos, music, source code etc.) safely out of the way while I rebuilt my machine. After some research I bought a Western Digital Scorpio Blue 500GB for around £65. It's a 5400RPM drive (same as the old drive), but runs silent and also at a lower wattage so that helps the battery out. Installing the hard drive was a relatively simple procedure, no jumper changes on the drive were required.
Step #3 : Slot in the Windows 7 DVD and install the operating system
This is a pretty slick process now. Microsoft have done a good job of hardware detection and driver support. The process took around 30 minutes.
Step #4 : Sort out the hardware anomolies
There are 2 pieces of hardware that are not correctly installed by the Windows 7 installation:
When I bought the Sony, Vista Home came preinstalled, and while the machine has been relatively stable I was underwhelmed by general performance and battery life. It has a P8400 processor and 4GB RAM so I was working on the basis that the hardware was not to blame and that Windows 7 should improve the user experience.
Step #1 : Create a Sony recovery DVD set (2DVDs)
You never know what will happen when you have reformatted your hard drive, so it's good to have this safety net. Unfortunately Sony provide all the hardware drivers and applications in a .MOD format, which means that us mere mortals will effectively be starting from scratch when the base Operating System is changed.
Step #2 : Buy a new hard drive (optional)
I took the view that hard drives are cheap and that I wanted all of my data (photos, music, source code etc.) safely out of the way while I rebuilt my machine. After some research I bought a Western Digital Scorpio Blue 500GB for around £65. It's a 5400RPM drive (same as the old drive), but runs silent and also at a lower wattage so that helps the battery out. Installing the hard drive was a relatively simple procedure, no jumper changes on the drive were required.
Step #3 : Slot in the Windows 7 DVD and install the operating system
This is a pretty slick process now. Microsoft have done a good job of hardware detection and driver support. The process took around 30 minutes.
Step #4 : Sort out the hardware anomolies
There are 2 pieces of hardware that are not correctly installed by the Windows 7 installation:
- A Ricoh SD card driver - this was resolved by connecting the Vaio to the Internet and letting Windows Update take care of it.
- The Sony Firmware Extension Parser driver - this is not handled by Windows Update and a driver had to be downloaded from Sony. Visit http://support.vaio.sony.eu/computing/vaio/downloads/preinstalled/index.aspx?l=en_GB&m=VGN-FW21E and click on the "Previously installed" tab. Select the "SFEP Driver" and extract the zip file to a temporary folder. Then open the Windows 7 Device Manager and locate the "Unknown device". Right mouse click and select "Update driver" then use the "Browse my computer" option to locate the temporary folder containing the extracted zip file. Click "Next" and let Windows 7 install the new driver.
Step #5 : Sort out the Softkeys (Alt+Blue key) and media controls (silver play, pause etc).
This was the hard bit. Sony don't make it easy for you to find the necessary installers to get these going.
The Sony website where you can find the necessary downloads is: http://support.vaio.sony.eu/computing/vaio/downloads/preinstalled/index.aspx?l=en_GB&m=VGN-FW21E
This will vary if you dont have a VGN-FW21E, so you should start at http://support.vaio.sony.eu/computing/vaio/index.aspx?l=en_GB or http://support.vaio.sony.eu/computing/vaio/flash/hub_cons.html if you want to specify your country.
After a significant amount of research (see references) and ranting I downloaded and installed the following in the same order as shown below.
- Sony Shared Library [5.1 _ 5.1.00.07110] (Originally installed tab)
- VAIO Event Service [4.1 _083Q_ 4.1.00.07150] (Originally installed tab)
- Setting Utility Series [4.1_083Q_4.1.00.08130] (Updates tab)
- VAIO Control Center 3.1 [083Q_ 3.1.00.07110] (Updates tab)
- VAIO Power Management [3.1 _ 3.1.00.08060] (Originally installed tab)
Step #6 : Update the Realtek audio and ATI video drivers
This was not strictly necessary, but I wanted to have some of the associated hardware applications for the audio & video such as the Catalyst control center. I looked at downloading directly from ATI but their distrbution did not seem to work, so I fell back on the Sony support site. The packages were downloaded and installed as shown:
- Audio Driver (Realtek) [6.0T_F_32_6.0.1.5653-0702] (Originally installed tab)
- Audio Driver Realtek HDMI [6.0B_32_6.0.1.5612_logo] (Originally installed tab)
- Graphics Driver ATI_Doraemon2 [8.513.1.0] (Originally installed tab)
Step #7 : Sit back and enjoy Windows 7.
Performance improvement is siginificant over Vista, my battery gives me about an extra 30% life and hard drive activity light is greatly reduced. This is what Vista should have been.
AB
References : VAIO FW Clean Windows 7 Install Guide, http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=355715
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