So I informed the nephews of my intention to put Windows 7 on the desktop system at home and gave the, a couple of weeks to backup any stuff they really wanted to keep since I would not guarantee that anything would survive the transition from Windows XP to Windows 7.
I ended up giving them a bit more time than I originally intended before I got around to putting Windows 7 on that machine. I used the used the Windows Easy Transfer tool to migrate their existing user profiles to an external hard drive and the, since I decided to go with Windows 7 64bit on that machine I rebooted the machine and installed the new OS. It all went as advertised and the installation ran unattended by me. I came back later to find it completely installed and then used the Easy Migration tool to restore the profiles from the hard drive.
I had a brief play about with the new OS and though it looked really pretty and left the young 'uns at it for about a week or so. After that interval, I got no complaints and I decided to reinstall the printer and get it shared to my laptop still running XP. Since i use this for development I decided to wait for my MSDN Windows 7 release to upgrade the laptop, though I was still unsure. I have a few apps in mid development and I am always wary about changing OS in mid development.
However, I find that I am spending more time taking care of my mother and less in development these days. Though I will find the time to get in some more development work as soon as I get some things sorted out.
Anyway, back to Windows 7, printer sharing was not too bad with the help of a useful article from HowtoGeek. The only problem was that the share on the windows 7 machine was not sharing out the correct printer drivers. I solved that by installing the printer drivers on the laptop and every thing worked fine.
After a couple of weeks I was starting to get really cheesed off on the boot times of the laptop as compared to the Windows 7 machine, and more particularly the time after the desktop comes up but Windows is still loading services and what not and you have activated FireFox or Outlook but they do not become usable for another 10 minutes as distinct to near instantly on Windows 7.
So my MSDN disks arrive and I decided to take the plunge and install Windows 7 on my laptop. Since I am not working for any boss at the moment and my development efforts are for fun and to keep me in the game I decided to live on the edge and see what happened. So same as before, I migrated my profile using the Windows Easy Transfer Tool and installed Windows 7 and Microsoft Security Essentials.
Every thing ran smoothly and no hiccups until I tried to connect to the shared printer on the desktop, it picked up the printer but would not print.
I reckon the problem is that the desktop machine was sharing out the 64 bit drivers while I had installed the 32 bit version of Windows 7 on the laptop. So I tried the automated troubleshooting software and in the middle the desktop machine rebooted to get something working and failed to boot.
It posted but hung in the boot. So I thought it is not with the new version that long and I had not created a recovery disk so I would simply reboot the machine with the Windows DVD and reinstall but now the installer does not recognise the hard drive.
Not to worry I though, it is not too mission critical to me, though it may bother the nephews so I will just complete installing stuff on the laptop, and sort out the desktop machine later.. So on with Office and Firefox and then horrors of horrors Civilization 4 does not run properly.
Now its serious :-)
The error was quite weird, the game basically ran but the Audio Settings were not visible and the graph had some internal programming constant names instead on the constant string values and I could not launch a revolution to change civics. Some of the dialogues were also messed up with constant programming names appearing instead of the underlying string values.
The solution, un-install the applications, including manually removing both the application files and the game profiles. Reinstall Civ 4 core game and then manually download and install the latest patch, I got it from here because I kept getting errors on the official page. Then go find the actual file
Right click on the selected exe file and select the "Troubleshoot Compatibility" option and then follow the wizard. So Civ ran as intended then install the expansion, in my case the "Beyond the Sword" expansion. Repeat the compatibility steps with the expansion. This is now running normally. At least a quick few turns with the Romans indicate that all seem normal at the moment.I will blog more here as my adventures unfold. My next trick is to continue my experiment to play all civs in the game and see how I do. I am going to use this to test windows 7 before i start installing my development applications like Visual Studio and SQL Server and so forth.
I am also going to have a look at the backup and recovery stuff and see if I can resurrect the desktop machine.
So final thoughts, Well it looks good and it boots quickly and it seems as stable as XP so far, apart from the issue of what ever happened to the desk top machine.
