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Sep 13, 2009
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After 4 years, my fully up-to-date XP install got completely messed up so given Win7 was so close, decided to try the RC rather than go back thru multiple XP updates/patches. Yes, I know it is an older laptop but it does have 1.25Gb RAM.

I ran into the Intel GMA855 graphics lack of support but the forums here got me through the fiddle to get the Vista drivers running. OK, some of the Dell utility software is no longer available so some of the dedicated Fn keys no longer work but I rarely used them anyway.

However, the big gotcha right now is battery and power management. Battery life has been decimated because cpu throttling does not work which is a killer when running on battery alone. It is stuck at 1.6GHz whereas under XP, throttling regularly dropped it back to 600MHz. This one alone may be the one that stops me bothering to upgrade on Win7 on this laptop. But it would be nice as generally, performance seems smoother although much of this may be due to only installing the minimum required stuff.
 


Solution
I have pursued the power management difficulties and so far come up with :

(1) Notebook Management Control utility does not seem to work correctly. There is a new version coming one day so maybe it will be the winner.

(2) I seem to be getting useful results from the Rightmark CPU Clock utility. To be honest, I have fiddled with the options so many times I am not sure what seemed to get it right. But I configured it to ignore Windows 7 power management schemes and it seems to do the right thing when I pull the power plug although it does not dynamically change cpu clock according to load. So I have it on 50% cpu when on battery and it seems to do this. Not perfect but I have spent enough time on this for the moment and it is not...
I have pursued the power management difficulties and so far come up with :

(1) Notebook Management Control utility does not seem to work correctly. There is a new version coming one day so maybe it will be the winner.

(2) I seem to be getting useful results from the Rightmark CPU Clock utility. To be honest, I have fiddled with the options so many times I am not sure what seemed to get it right. But I configured it to ignore Windows 7 power management schemes and it seems to do the right thing when I pull the power plug although it does not dynamically change cpu clock according to load. So I have it on 50% cpu when on battery and it seems to do this. Not perfect but I have spent enough time on this for the moment and it is not burning a hole thru my lap anymore.

And I now have 3 tools in my tray telling me how much battery life I have left : 96 mins, 102 mins, 10 mins. Laptop batteries ? I am not even going to bother going there ! :confused:
 


Solution
Another unrelated issue was network shares between Win7RC and WinXPPro. XP sees the W7 shares no problems but the other way is erratic - get problems requiring username and password. Should work without that as I use same username and password on both. I editted "host" file and added the XP address & problem disappeared.

It appears others have experienced similar.
 


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