Windows 7 upgrade installment II. Friday night I booted back into the Windows 7 machine and installed the Adobe Creative Suite. Then a few utilities I find indispensable and I called it a night! Saturday morning I installed Office 2007 and began getting my printers configured. I also installed SpyBot to block any spyware/malware that may be lurking in my future.
Windows 7 moved a few things around, like printers. It’s now tucked away in the control panel under “devices and printers’ instead of just printers. It also categorizes all of the devices it finds. The ones that need help were tagged and with a little work I was able to upgrade all of the device drivers to work with Windows 7, including my Hauppauge TV tuner. The Gretag MacBeth X-Rite Colorimeter was the biggest struggle, but I did find a driver that would work. It just took a little creativity to get it to install. I was able to calibrate both monitors easily.
Sunday, was accounting software day. I know what you’re thinking, why would I have Accounting on my graphics machine. Right? Well, it’s simple. I’m lazy and I don’t want to get up to do billing. I use Peachtree 2008 and it installs just fine. However, the email function won’t work. Some investigation reveals the Peachtree email writer print driver won’t install. After nearly a whole day of not getting this to work, I realize Peachtree isn’t going to support Windows 7 in the 2008 version.. So, I have to boot back into my Vista machine to do billing. :o( I ordered Peachtree 2010.
Back in Windows 7, there are some really cool features that I’m diggin. Aero really works, Ready Boost really works. Great background themes that rotate like web shots and just hovering over the running program tabs on the start bar pops up a thumbnail of all the open pages to choose from. The start bar has been optimized too. Now you can launch your favorites from the start bar and there’s a desktop menu too.
Monday I moved on to installing and configuring my Logitech Setpoint software as well as the Wacom tablet driver. I also configured Photoshop and Bridge preferences and did some editing in Photoshop.
Later in the day I noticed a scrolling issue in Internet Explorer 8 on my secondary monitor. It was real jumpy and typing was lagging too. I worked on it most of the day and my brilliant wife suddenly says, did you try the browser on your main monitor? Duh, no, I’m too stupid for that kind of logic. I moved the browser to my main monitor and it worked perfectly. Now, I start researching this issue and eventually come to the conclusion that it’s my video card combination. I’m running an ATI X1800 Crossfire (main) and an ATI HD 2400 Pro (secondary). The 2400 has Windows 7 support, but the X1800 not so much. I mean it works perfectly but the drivers don’t want to coexist. So I buy a new video card and all is well. Thank god for eBay.
Peachtree should be here today, but I’m calling the upgrade a success regardless. I really like the performance increase and the system boots much faster too. I think the Video is a bit sharper, could be the clear type optimizer. Let me know if you run into problems with your upgrade, maybe I can help.
Regards,
David