[Alan]

I have a client who purchased a new HP Pavillion this week and I installed it today. I forget the exact model, but it had an AMD Quad processor, 8GB RAM, 640GB Hard Drive & Win 7 Home Premium 64-bit edition.

One thing that surprised me was the absence of most bloatware we've been accustomed to seeing on new PC's. All I ununstalled was Norton Internet Security, that's it. It came with a trial version of MS Office Home & Student edition which I left on because a copy was purchased with the PC. There was a shorcut to Ebay and a couple other websites on the desktop which I deleted - quick and easy.

The initial bootup process was nice and fast. Didn't need to go through as many screens as with XP & Vista, although HP runs a silly setup program before getting to the desktop.

I installed two older HP printers (one USB, one networked). With the USB all I did was connect the printer to the system and Win 7 installed the drivers automatically within a couple of minutes (with none of that bloated HP software). Then I configured a TCP/IP port for the network printer. Again, Win 7 found the printer and installed the drivers automatically. Made my life very easy.

The Windows Easy Transfer Wizard worked great (used it to transfer data from old to new PC). Too bad the old computer didn't have a gigabit network adapter - the data transfer would have been alot faster, but it wasn't bad.

The system didn't come with any reicovery discs (I hate when that happens), so I'll be going back next week to create a set. Other than that this was a very simple & smooth installation. Just wanted to share the experience for anyone thinking about purchasing a new PC with Windows 7. IMO, go for it

[wheel]

Check online, on some HP models you can reset the program for the backup disks so it can be reused. Also, make sure you have some high quality DVD's. Their burning program will reject otherwise.

[Alan]

Thanks for the info wheel. Actually, for this client, what I'll do is create an image of the hard drive onto another hard drive and store it (unconnected) inside the system (I'll also burn the image onto DVD's for storage off-site). That way if the main drive should fail I can get it up and running in 5 minutes. Sure, by the time the main drive dies the image will be outdated, but I'll update it once a quarter. There's also an external backup drive for data. This system is critical to the business, so every effort is made to backup data daily

[mydeal]

Perhaps you mentioned this elsewhere Alan, but what do you use/recommend for making drive images?

[wheel]

Acronis is a great program for images.

[Alan]

Acronis is a great program for images.

Yupp, Acronis or Ghost is what I usually use. I have a small tower that I take with me on-site. I remove the client's drive from their system, connect it to my system (along with a clean hard drive) and clone it. I make sure the clone is bootable, then connect the original drive back to the way it was with the clone just sitting there waiting for disaster to strike. In the future, should the main drive fail, I just move the sata and power connectors to the clone and it's up and running in minutes, not hours or days. Any data backup since the last clone is restored within minutes as well.

I take the position that it's not how easy it is to backup, but how easy it is to restore should disaster strike Do something like I just described and you're worth your weight in gold when disaster strikes.

[Alan]

Today I upgraded 2 Vista systems to Windows 7. These were two of the smoothest installations I ever did. Ran the Easy Transfer Wizard on both systems to collect data & settings then performed clean installations on new hard drives using the Windows 7 Upgrade versions. Was able to activate Windows by using method #2 described here.

Windows 7 installed just about all of the system drivers (one Dell, one HP). The drivers that didn't get installed during the Windows installation were installed during Windows Update. Printers installed very quickly - didn't need to manually download a thing.

One thing that made me extermely happy was that the Easy Transfer Wizard also transferred all Outlook data and settings. I ran the Transfer Wizard on Windows 7 to import the data before installing Office 2007. After installing Office 2007 I started Outlook and everything was there - didn't need to configure anything. Very happy Also installed iTunes and it picked up all its settings as well.

I'll report back if the client has any issues. I don't anticipate any though.

[n99nyrwg]

I have yet to see Win7 or use it. I just never got around to downloading the beta.

I can't wait for the auto install of printers. I hate going to HP's site and having to download a 30MB driver, and then 50% of the time there site isn't working properly, all just to print something.

[Alan]

I have yet to see Win7 or use it. I just never got around to downloading the beta.

I can't wait for the auto install of printers. I hate going to HP's site and having to download a 30MB driver, and then 50% of the time there site isn't working properly, all just to print something.

Yeah, I agree. The Photosmart printers are the worst. They force the end user to install software that I rarely see anyone use. All I want is the friggin driver man. The installation of a laser printer can take a couple of minutes, whereas a photosmart can take 20+ minutes.....if the installation doesn't fail.

[WillyNilly]

I have an HP laserjet 1012 and it was a tough time to get its drivers to install under vista...I think I had to use XP drivers for it to work, since it was older and Vista didn't support it. Win 7 take care of those issues or do I have to manually install those drivers again if I upgrade?

I'm tempted to do the file transfer to back things up so I don't have to do a lot of reinstalling, but instead of PC-to-PC, I'm hoping to do PC-USB HDD then upgrade and back again.

Satisfied user of Vista, but there's a reason why only one computer in my house has vista on it

[dboy]

For backup, anywhere that has multiple (but 10 or less) computers I HIGHLY recommend Windows Home Server. I have it at my house running on an old desktop w/ a bunch of drives in it. Access shared media, plus it does automatic nightly backups of every computer in the house. When a drive dies (or otherwise need to reinstall, such as when I #$%#$ my partitions the other day), you just boot off a recovery disc which finds the WHS on the network, prompts you for which machine it is, and copies over the image. My desktop w/ around 200gb on the C drive reinstalled in about an hour and was up and running.

It's even smart enough to save server space - since so many files are the same on our computers (Windows, office, etc), it only saves those once. you can also browse into your backup images to recover single files if you need.

[cron]

I have an HP laserjet 1012 and it was a tough time to get its drivers to install under vista...I think I had to use XP drivers for it to work, since it was older and Vista didn't support it. Win 7 take care of those issues or do I have to manually install those drivers again if I upgrade?

hard to say. The dell page lists some printers that are unsupported, but Win 7 had no problem installing drivers on it's own. Could be the same thing for some HP printers.

my HP officejet seems to actually work better with Win 7 than Vista.

i found a few topics on the hp forums that might help though:
http://h30434.www3.hp.com/psg/board/messag...p;thread.id=231
http://h30434.www3.hp.com/psg/board/messag...message.id=9308

[Alan]

I have an HP laserjet 1012 and it was a tough time to get its drivers to install under vista...I think I had to use XP drivers for it to work, since it was older and Vista didn't support it. Win 7 take care of those issues or do I have to manually install those drivers again if I upgrade?

HP came out with Vista drivers for the 1012, 32-bit and 64-bit
You can use them for Windows 7

Edit: I hope they can be used. HP states that the 1000, 1010 and 1012 are not supported in Windows 7. However, I have a Laserjet P1006 where I used the Vista driver and it works fine. Sucks that a printer currently being sold does not have Windows 7 specific drivers yet.

This post has been edited by Alan: 11-4-09, 2:45pm

[WillyNilly]

I have an HP laserjet 1012 and it was a tough time to get its drivers to install under vista...I think I had to use XP drivers for it to work, since it was older and Vista didn't support it. Win 7 take care of those issues or do I have to manually install those drivers again if I upgrade?

HP came out with Vista drivers for the 1012, 32-bit and 64-bit
You can use them for Windows 7

Edit: I hope they can be used. HP states that the 1000, 1010 and 1012 are not supported in Windows 7. However, I have a Laserjet P1006 where I used the Vista driver and it works fine. Sucks that a printer currently being sold does not have Windows 7 specific drivers yet.

Goes to show how out of it I've been... I finally got my printer to work via http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bizsupport/TechS...=reg_R1002_USEN

http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bizsupport/TechS...SeriesId=377934 shows a Win7 driver, so I assume it'd work, unless it links to the same driver.

I wonder when I'd have time to even perform an OS upgrade of my Dell

[Alan]

http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bizsupport/TechS...SeriesId=377934 shows a Win7 driver, so I assume it'd work, unless it links to the same driver.

Click through the Win 7 links on that page. No driver there. But, there's another link that takes you to Product Support for Microsoft Windows 7. Then, there's another link on that page (titled Selecting the Correct Printer Driver) which takes you here. Crazy.

This post has been edited by Alan: 11-5-09, 4:45am

[steltek]

I have yet to see Win7 or use it. I just never got around to downloading the beta.

I can't wait for the auto install of printers. I hate going to HP's site and having to download a 30MB driver, and then 50% of the time there site isn't working properly, all just to print something.

Yeah, I agree. The Photosmart printers are the worst. They force the end user to install software that I rarely see anyone use. All I want is the friggin driver man. The installation of a laser printer can take a couple of minutes, whereas a photosmart can take 20+ minutes.....if the installation doesn't fail.

I upgraded an older Dell Dimension E5150/XPS 420 system last night from XP Home to Win7 Home Premium. The Easy Transfer Wizard locked up twice at the 30 minute mark - I've truly come to despise that thing and doubt I'll ever mess with it again. I finally gave up on it and manually transferred like 15GB of data (mainly pictures) to an external HD.

The install went fairly smooth, though it took well over an hour to add all the updates and to install Picasa and Windows Messenger/Windows Live (and to research how to get Windows Messenger to minimize from the task bar to the system tray like it used to - the owner REALLY didn't like its new behavior of minimizing only to the task bar).

All told, it was probably the easiest Windows upgrade I've ever attempted even considering the time I wasted trying to use the transfer wizard (a mistake I won't make again).

BTW, Alan, I agree with you on the Photosmart printers - they produce pretty good output, but the software ought to be used as prime examples of bloat gone wild in programming classes. The one I had to install last night (a Photosmart 7660) doesn't have a Win7 driver yet but worked just fine using the simple DeskJet 5600 driver from the Win7 DVD as suggested by HP's website. The owner doesn't use the built-in Photosmart memory card reader, so we may just leave it with the DeskJet driver for the immediate future if she doesn't have any printing problems (even when HP finally gets around to releasing a Photosmart 7600 series Win7 driver).