Saturday 2 May 2009

EnergizeIT Windows 7 Install Fest – Edmonton

We had a lot of fun with the folks that showed up for the EnergizeIT Windows 7 Install Fest.

We got to see folks installing Windows 7 on Macs, using BootCamp, dual booting Vista and Windows 7 or XP and Windows 7 on Intel/AMD hardware, all manner of laptops, and even some brave fellows that brought along their PC systems.

There was a small group that came to help out with the installs and were designated Proctors. We walked about the large room checking with the people installing Windows 7 to make sure they were getting through the process with as little difficulty as possible.

Other than one laptop that did not have near enough RAM (256MB) or disk space (8GB) to install as it was too old, we had a 99% successful install rate. A few hiccups here and there with drivers and figuring out how to shrink an existing partition to enable dual booting were encountered.

For newer laptops, there were a lot of exclamation marks in the Device Manager. For older hardware, there were a few exclamation marks for chipsets and Intel motherboard management features.

Damir Bersinic, John Bristowe, and Qixing Zheng put on a very good EnergizeIT event for us. Across the three evenings we received some very valuable information on Windows 7, Windows Server 2008 R2, and Windows Azure.

The three evenings were well worth the time.

Philip Elder
MPECS Inc.
Microsoft Small Business Specialists
Co-Author: SBS 2008 Blueprint Book

*All Mac on SBS posts will not be written on a Mac until we replace our now missing iMac! (previous blog post)

Windows Live Writer

4 comments:

chenzhihao said...

i when to this, the folks at MS were great, my pc was the sony tz, i was not able to install at the hotel, however, once i got home, i was able to install, (and run windows 7, after all the drivers were installed as well).

i love win 7, lets hope that the pricing will be low so it can jump start the IT economy. i was running win 7 since build 7000, (later 7077, now 7100).

i would like to thank the MS crew for giving us (edmonton) the rc release of win 7.

thank care.
chanchiho

chenzhihao said...

update:
i am have installed the rc of windows 7, now i am running the rtm of windows 7, everything is good except the biometric reader.

Philip Elder Cluster MVP said...

Patrick,

In our case, the driver for the reader was able to be picked up via Windows Update.

Run the Update Driver dialogue and choose to allow a check of the Internet and you may find that the driver is there.

Philip

chenzhihao said...

thanks , phil,
i have everything working now.. i even have win 7 rtm installed, everything is good, had to install the drivers from sony.ca, all the function buttons work,even the biometric function as well, so you guys can tell sony canada that win 7 will work on sony tz vgn-tz47cn
thanks
chan chiho