The other day I bought a copy of Windows 7 Pro for the PC I’m piecing together. After I got it, I thought how nice it would be to at least be familiar with the OS when I hit the power switch on the new PC for the 1st time. Then I got to thinking about how much I dislike Vista on my laptop. After a quick compatibility check I decided to take it for a spin to see what I thought of it.
I wanted to do a clean install, I don’t care for OS upgrades, most leave too many fragments laying around. So I moved any important files to my desktop PC, slipped in the new shiny Win 7 DVD and rebooted. After selecting the language, keyboard and locale options the installer took me to the 2nd screen to choose the partition I wanted to install the OS to. I still had the software backup partition with Vista and original software on the drive… This is a new OS, I won’t be need that, delete. OK now there is unused space, so I’ll just delete the main partition as well and create a new one. Delete, confirm, New, size, Apply. Then a window pops up saying that Windows may create additional partitions for system files, choices are OK or Cancel. I don’t want to cancel but it’s not OK either! After doing some digging I found if you accept creating the partition at install time it is fairly difficult to remove. I don’t know if that is true because I also found that to avoid the extra partition from being created the drive must be partitioned before beginning installation. To do this from the Win 7 DVD, boot from the DVD and at the language, keyboard and locale selection screen hit SHIFT + F10 keys to bring up a command prompt. From the command prompt you can run diskpart to create a partition on you drive, you will need to partition all the space on your drive or Windows will still create the unwanted partition in the unallocated space.
The rest of the installation went along flawlessly, without so much as a hiccup.
One thing I found after the installation was complete was that at the logon screen numlock was always off. After logon your previous state was restored. I love the keypad and my password contains numeric characters so this won’t fly. I did some browsing and seen that Shawn, a support engineer for Microsoft, claims that the numlock state before logon is a BIOS setting and not a Windows feature. Unacceptable answer, sorry Shawn. By default Windows 7 boots with numlock state from the BIOS setting. However if your BIOS does not have numlock state as an option Windows defaults to numlock off at boot time. But it can be changed with a couple quick edits to the registry… It must be one of those undocumented features Microsoft loves, right Shawn? OK, so let’s document this in case someone else might want to do this too. The keys that need to be modified are:
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Keyboard\InitialKeyboardIndicators
HKEY_USERS\.DEFAULT\Control Panel\Keyboard\InitialKeyboardIndicators
You will also need to change the Key for each unique user ID number in the HKEY_USERS hive.
HKEY_USERS\{your unique user id number}\Control Panel\Keyboard\InitialKeyboardIndicators
The best way to find all keys is to open regedit under an adminstrator account and find each occurance of InitialKeyboardIndicators key.
You will need to assign the value of 2 to each of the above keys. This will set numlock state to on at boot time. Below is the complete list of options if you would also like to set your caplocks and scrollock state as well.
0 – Turn all indicators Off (NumLock, CapsLock, ScrollLock)
1 – Turn CapsLock On
2 – Turn NumLock On
3 – Turn CapsLock and NumLock On
4 – Turn ScrollLock On
5 – Turn CapsLock and ScrollLock On
6 – Turn NumLock and ScrollLock On
7 – Turn all indicators On (NumLock, CapsLock, ScrollLock)
After fixing that I reinstalled all my other software and changed various settings to my liking. I did have to set a couple older programs to run in compatibility mode, but everything went well.
My first impression of Windows 7 is a very good one. User Access Control is much less intrusive than in Vista and can be adjusted depending on how often you would like to be interrupted by it. I also must say that setting up a home network with XP on my desktop PC was much simpler than it was in Vista. The quicklaunch bar is gone (although you can get it back) instead you can pin items directly to the taskbar or start menu easily. The jury is still out on my opinion 7’s use of libraries, I can see where it could be useful, I’m just not used to it yet.
I will keep XP on my old desktop, it’s old enough that I can’t justify putting 7 on it. But after the test drive I’ve decided to keep 7 on the laptop and I’ll have to get another copy for the new PC, so I’ll be playing with 7 for quite some time. I’ll jot down some notes here if I find some things about it that can’t be easily found elsewhere on the net.
