Not Your Typical IT Guys

Every day I’m impressed with Windows 7.  Please, don’t get me wrong… I have sworn at Microsoft in the past and I am far from a Bill Gates groupie (unlike all you Steve Jobs groupies!)  I do however have an appreciation for a fine piece of technology… and this time W7 is it.  I’ve now been running W7 x64 for quite awhile on my beefy HP laptop and been very pleased with it’s performance and overall handling.  Here is my post about the upgrade from Vista.

With such good experience I didn’t hesitate a moment to install W7 on my daughters HP Netbook, 1GB RAM with 16GB Solid State Drive. When preparing for the install I was apprehensive because I read all these posts about how you couldn’t install W7 from anything other than a DVD, here was the hack to make it work, yadah yadah yadah. I decided to be bold and do my own thing, I went ahead and put the install package on a USB and installed a fresh copy to her netbook straight from the USB.  It installed without a hitch and it is running awesome!

So the Netbook was cool, but now it really gets good.

Sitting around the house is an old Dell Latitude D600.  When I say old I mean seriously old… circa 2004 :0P , 1.5 GHz Intel with 768MB’s of RAM. Even MS says W7 requires at least 1GB RAM… but I figured, why not.  The current Windows XP install with almost nothing else on the system barely runs and my youngest daughter needs a WebKinz machine.  So what the heck lets install a fresh copy of W7 on it and see what happens.

WOW!  It runs better than the day it came from Dell with Win XP.  Now in all fairness, the video leaves something to be desired but hey…so does the video on WebKinz World so it will do.  But other than that it really runs fantastic.  It installed every driver except the audio drivers during the OS install.  I downloaded the XP audio drivers from Dell and they installed without issue, game on!  I’ve been playing with this thing to really try to hose it up and I can’t, it really is solid.  The touch pad that wasn’t working on XP… now works, the Wireless Card that I had disabled on XP and replaced with a USB wireless…. now works!  The system really runs like a champ.

It has got me thinking… W7 is looking like a great candidate for revitalizing some old systems and turning them into Dumb Terminals for Citrix…… stay tuned…..