Okay so now is the time when the Windows 7 was already out, I was running Vista 32 and XP on my system. Windows XP was old and the new internet connection didn't work on it and Vista was too damn slow for me to actually do something other than browsing! One of the major disadvantages of Vista is the extremely slow I/O. Being a designer I spend most of the time on photoshop and dreamweaver, but on vista, the simple task of pressing the spacebar (hand cursor) and then click and dragging could not be done properly. It always detected the mouse click first and the key press afterwords despite of the fact that I pressed the key first and then clicked. Anyway, every time I wanted to move the canvas, vista made any one of the design elements to go to the north pole and stick there!
Anyway, I got a little frustrated to having two OSt, so I thought I should install the new Windows 7 64-bit. The reviews of windows 7 were quite good. People said it is much lighter than the Vista and much much more visually better than XP. So... I thought I should give it a try. Now I should mention my lifelong dislike with Microsoft so I already had in mind that something - at least one thing would go wrong. So here is the installation process with timestamp as I tried my luck.
10:28 PM
I put in the Windows 7 64-bit bootable DVD in my DVD drive and the setup started. It showed me something like "loading setup"... I thought to myself... Hmmm good start.
10:30 PM
It then loaded a graphical screen with a bluish background and some curves. It was much better than the dos-type installation of XP! What I noticed was a leafy artwork in the background and a bird in white. I thought what's with the nature Windows 7!? Still don't know what's the concept behind that leaf and a bird illustration in the Windows 7 background! Maybe going green or something! :)
10:32 PM
It then asked me to select my language. I selected my own Country and was quite amazed to see my own language in the list "IN" the setup. Urdu is an Asian language and we had to install it separately. Anyway, good thing to have Asian language support from the beginning of the setup, but I selected English and pressed "next"...
10:35 PM
It then showed me a "two" step installation screen. The first was I think "Checking System" and the other was "Installing Windows" or something like that. Anyway, 5 second later during checking system I got an ERROR: "The CD/DVD ROM Drive Driver not found..." It gave me two buttons "Cancel" and "Browse", I tried everything, tried searching for the driver, tried canceling it, but there was NO WAY I could skip pass that error message and continue with the installation. The interesting part is that the DVD was already in the drive, the system booted up with the same DVD drive, the setup loaded its "necessary" files from that DVD ROM drive and now it is refusing that there is no driver for it so can not continue. So here is what I did, I restarted my system, went back into Vista, and started Googleing.
12:20 PM - ERROR: "The CD/DVD ROM Drive Driver not found..." While installing Windows 7 64-bit
As you can see I have spent almost 2 hours in searching for any fix for this error but didn't find any. What I found from the internet was a guy who was able to get it through by buying a new DVD ROM drive! I mean that is just simply stupid! Some said look for the jumper settings, some said fix the cables, some said download a new torrent and verify the disk after burning. Anyway, none of it made sense to me, so a friend of mine dropped by and he mentioned something about disabling "SATA Native" support. Well that was something that I could try! So I went into my BIOS and looked for the specific settings. I have ASUS M2N-E motherboard with AMD Athlon X2 Dual Core processor, 3GB of RAM, 250GB SATA drive and a standard SONY DVD-RW ROM Drive. The thing was that I didn't find the "SATA Native Support" option in my BIOS settings. However I did see something like "Serial ATA Support" and "RAID" settings under in Advance > Onboard Devices in BIOS Menu. I was able to resolve this CD/DVD Drive Driver not found error during installation of windows 7 by enabling "RAID". I only had two options, RAID -> Enable / Disable. A few people said that it should have been AHCI and some said that enabling RAID is not recommended and the windows might not work after that. But it worked for me for now.
12:30 PM
So after 2 hours of searching and trials and rebooting I was finally able to get pass this error message. And by the grace of God the setup was finally running. It was a breath of fresh air. It then listed around 5-6 steps, and took almost 10 to 15 minutes in "Expanding files".
12:40 PM
At this time the setup completed expanding files and it rebooted. When the system came back on again, the most weird thing I noticed that the background of the setup was now flipped horizontally! Still didn't get the logic behind that!
12:45 PM
Now as usual - "Completing Installation"
12:47 PM
Again the system rebooted, now I see the great "Preparing windows to load for the first time"! Now it was sort of a good feeling to be able to get to this point without loosing anything else. Then finally it asked me to create an account, I supplied the password and again the the famous "Finalizing Settings" screen :)
12:50 PM
Finalizing Settings
12:52 PM
Preparing Desktop - Then again restart
01:00 PM
FINALLY! I was finished with the installation and the "enter password" screen was in front of me. I entered the password and was expecting a LOT of drivers that I still have to install. In earlier versions of windows I had to install the drivers from the ASUS Motherboard CD, the sound drivers and the Radeon X550 graphic card drivers. But interestingly enough windows 7 had all the drivers pre-installed. When the windows was ready and I had my profile in front of me I amazingly didn't need to install all the third party drivers. It was indeed the best surprise up till now :)
However, I did go to windows update and downloaded whatever Microsoft had for me to "update", most of them were security updates a few driver updates etc. The windows was ready to use and I started to install the other softwares such as Office Suite and messengers and stuff. The windows indeed is quite better than older versions. A major first glance change I saw was the way they merged the taskbar buttons and the quick launch buttons. It is a good addition to the new windows usability. Other than that some of the good features includes - what I call windows-gestures. For instance, if you click and drag the window and touch it at the top of the screen, it would maximize itself, dragging it back would restore it's original size. Touching it on the left or right would tile it vertically on the left or the right, shaking it would minimize all the other windows but the one clicked on. Anyway, the overall feel is quite right IMO!
My final thoughts about the installation would be, Good but not that great, I'd rate it 7 out of 10. I did face some technical / hardware related issues later on which I will be writing about quite soon. But one thing I should mention, as I wrote earlier that I had two installations of windows, one was XP and the other was vista. I installed windows 7 over XP after formatting the partition, but left vista as a backup. BUT, windows 7 did not add itself to the OS selection menu, rather it deleted the vista selection menu so there is no way for me to run vista now. I had to format that partition as well.
Anyway, no regrets in deleting both the operating system and have Windows 7!
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