I'm using the 64 Bit version.
I tried two wireless cards, a Linksys WMP54G and a D-Link 510GL, neither of which I could get to work with Win 7.
The D-Link DWA 522 wireless NIC card works with Win 7 but at time of writing is available in the USA but not the UK.
Conclusion is that at this stage Win 7 is not wireless NIC card friendly.
I hard wired the above machine to my router/modem and Win 7 connected online immediately. And more or less at the same time activated. This was good although as we all know this trial version will self-destruct come March 2010 (I think that's the terminal date anyway).
I applied all the updates.
Amongst them was a driver to get my HP printer listed above working, this was somewhat problematic with Vista so this was a good thing.
It's faster than Vista - and so it should be.
And that, for now, is about it.
In the coming weeks I'm going to treat this as if it was my main system, software, games, everything, and see how we get on.
My reports may be sporadic but anything of interest I find out I will post right here for all you good good people to dissect, digest, chew over and generally pick holes in
How's it coming along?
I just made the transittion to Windows 7 from Linux Debian.. My rig is old as the hills as I still use nVidia GeForceFX 5500 Titanium Graphics. Why would someone who's a complete geek downgrade from Linux to Windows you may ask...
Long story, basically I was holding a few packages from the file repositories and because of that when I went to perform a system update one-day out of the blue, my chosen god like OS decided it wanted to downgrade packages left-right & centre reducing my up to date copy of Firefox 14 to an older version of Firefox 3.6.15 there-by destroying nearly all the addon's which where incompatible with a previous version of firefox and that wasnt half of the worst of it. So I decided enough was enough, maybe time to hang up that hacking hat and re-install Windows 7 64-Bit.
I had a similar problem to your own when it came to Wireless Drivers, there where no compatible Wireless Drivers for a custom built Prism 2.5 wireless card which was hardly surprising as I had built it myself from a discarded Zyxel Router and an equally discarded US-Robotics wireless bridge... Amazing what you can salvage from spare parts with a screw-driver when your really determined. In the end I opted to go out and spend $17.99 on a new Wireless USB although a PCI card would have been my first choice but they where way too expensive, where-as the USB Netgear Dongle won me over on price at under $20.00
Surprisingly it has better connectivity than the piece of ancient technology I was using and I also managed to pick up a spare Linksys WRT54GL like the one shown on Lifehacker with the quote "turn your $60 bucks router into a $600 bucks router" with DD-WRT Firmware for next to nothing as my naighbor was throwing it away. (Bonus!)
I'm back off down to the shops tommorrow as I need to buy myself a new Digital TV card as well, turns out my analog card is now finally redundant as the digital switch over has finally taken place a few months back and the Brooktree BT878 which worked absolutely fine on Windows XP and Linux does not work on Windows 7 full stop!
Again I found pricing to be a huge factor on those too, a PCI Digital TV card will set you back $34.99 whereas a USB one with all the bells and whistles can be purchased for the same price as the Netgear $17.99
In the mean time I've been enjoying the Windows 7 experiance so far and being one of those people who cant resist tweaking and proding and poking bit's heres a screen shot of how its going so far.
The first thing you'll probably notice is the start orb got a little re-vamp in keeping with the open-source theme. Then rather than splash out even more money on stuff like Microsoft Office I opted to install the majority of all the open-source applications I could find that have been ported over to the Windows 7 OS. Roll on Libre-Office..
You can easily change your Windows Start Orb with the Windows Start Orb Changer and theres a really cool app available called WinBubble that lets you go crazy with even more tweaking so I grabbed a copy and set the Ferrari shown as the Background as the Default Login & Logout screen.
When it came to Anti-Virus I opted for Microsoft's Security Essentials (it's FREE) which I have to confess surprised me because it worked like a charm and has protected me from a few nasty surprises so far and firewall wise I wasnt too content with the default windows firewall so went off and grabbed a copy of the Free comodo firewall and then popped into the control panel to remove the gay little Geek Buddy helper which comes bundled with it as I hardly feel I need to converse with a Comodo geek buddy which nags you everytime you open the firewall.. "Click here to chat with a Professional Geek!"
In responce to Free Burning Software I use ImgBurn available from
www.imgburn.com
If you want a full list of free software applications that will rock your Windows 7 then here's my short but brief list.
Gimp2
KeePass2
Windows Live Essentials
Microsoft Security Essentials
Comodo Firewall & Sandbox
Deluge Bit Torrent Client
Wireshark
X-Setup Pro (available now for Free)
Overlook Fing
CCleaner
Gpg4Win
Libre Office
OpenSSL for Windows
PeaZip (Tar, Zip, Rar Free)
Vidalia Bundle (Tor onion router)
WinSCP
XAMMP (host websites on your own PC with Apache, Tomcat & FileZilla)
+ A few other extra's for firefox like the debug version of Flashplayer with all the Fire Addons like FireFTP FireSSH Firebug, FirePHP, Fireflash, Better Privacy etc, etc et al.
