Recent content by penguin386

Refund I agree. Send it bac,k, get a refund, then order a Dell or HP computer instead. If Gateway jerks you around like that, then they don't deserve your business.

Ghost Take a look at the Automated Installation Kit for Windows 7. Now Microsoft wants you to use ImageX to make images instead of third party utilities. I don't think it will be so easy to deploy Windows 7 computers without entering activation codes.

Clean Install Doing an Clean Install with ANY OS is always better. Just make sure you have the install media and activation codes for all of your installed programs. If you 'Upgrade', you may have corrupted .dll files that could cause problems, OEM crapware that will make your system run...

Upgrade Anywhere From what I've seen, Microsoft wants you to Upgrade online using Upgrade Anywhere. I guess they want you to pay money first.

Windows 7 Certification I want to take the 70-680 certification exam for Windows 7. It's a problem because most training materials are only available for Pre-Order right now. I think the Springboard Series videos and Technet resources are a good way to study for this exam. They are FREE too...

64 bit If your computer has 3gb of RAM or less, then why bother with the 64 bit incompatibilities?

Drivers? Driver incompatibility is why Vista was such a failure. I can't decide if upgrading to Vista was worse than the Win3.1 to Win95 upgrade or the Win98 to XP upgrade. I've tried a few Vista drivers with Windows 7 release candidate. They seem to work ok. Microsoft really made an effort...

Home Premium for Gaming Home Premium is better for gaming, because it comes with better Multi-Media support. A Home Premium computer will probably come with better graphics and sound too. The only reason to buy the Pro version is if you want to join your computer to an Active Directory...

$99 I'd be happy to pay $99 for a full version of Windows 7 Home Basic. $199 for the full version of Home Premium is just too expensive. and it has features that I really don't care about.

Virtualization If you want native XP virtualization in Windows 7, make sure your processor supports it. Not all Intel and AMD processors support it. I have 4 computers in my house and NONE of these processors support virtualization. Also, VHD images in Windows 7 are supposed to be .wim files...

Release Candidate The release candidate is build 7100. Wow, they had to change it 500 times to get it right before the RTM version.

NTFS partition size limit 2TB max? Thanks for posting that. It will come in handy for RAID configurations and could be a question on the 70-680 exam.

32 vs. 64 bit For me, I'm sticking with 32 bit. My motherboard only supports 2gb of RAM max. The main reason to switch to 64 bit is to address more than 3gb of RAM. Also, I've read that some programs and drivers don't work in 64 bit mode. Sure, 64 bit OS's can run in 32 bit mode, but that...

I tried this yesterday with the Windows 7 Ultimate release candidate. I was able to install both Windows 7 Starter Edition and Windows 7 Home Basic. When I deleted the EI.CFG file, the setup program brings up a menu and lets me choose which version to install. What I did was copy the CD to a...