Some time ago, I stated quite emphatically that I was never going to change from Windows 2000. Well, I have to eat my words.
I am finding that some applications struggle under a 32 bit OS and I finally bit the bullet and purchased a new laptop. This time an HP Pavilion 15-e007TX.
It’s a 4th generation i7 based machine and available at a good price. It only comes with a DOS OS though, so the challenge was to install Windows 7, when HP are pushing Windows 8. It was quite a struggle to find all the drivers for W7 – something I am not alone in, it seems many people want W7 rather than W8. Not surprising really.
For anyone interested, here is what I ended up finding and using:
For network go here (the driver on the HP site didn’t work for me):
And download this:
Win7 and WinServer 2008 R2 Auto Installation Program (SID:1606895)
Download HP’s ‘HP Support Assistant for Microsoft Windows® 7 (32/64 Bit)’
from here: http://h18021.www1.hp.com/helpandsupport/hp-self-support.html
Then run the diagnostics section and let it update. It will probably only update the Bluetooth driver but it’s a start
Download the media card driver from here:
Then go to HP’s FTP site ftp://ftp.hp.com/pub/softpaq/
And download and install the following Softpaqs
sp62227 Intel Rapid storage
sp62582 Intel Graphics driver – important, do this before the Radeon drivers!!!
sp62228 Audio drivers
Install the USB drivers form here:
Finally the Radeon Graphics drivers from here:
http://support.amd.com/en-us/download
It is important that the Intel Video drivers be loaded before the Radeon ones. You will not be able to load the Radeon drivers until the Intel ones are installed.
Some good links here that might be useful to some:
Once the drivers were installed and the updates to the updates of the Windows updates were complete, it was a matter of making Windows 7 useable.
The first thing of course is to turn off all the Aero crap. Whoever came up with that deserves a slow and painful death.
Then to get the network activity monitor back, download and install this:
http://www.itsamples.com/downloads/network-activity-indicator-setup.zip
One thing that had me going for a little while was that external USB hard drives were not recognized. Luckily it was a simple solution – go to Device manager select each of the USB Root hubs shown, and for each one turn off the power saving option.
There are a bunch of other tweaks possible, but it is very difficult to locate settings in Windows 7. My solution was to use a package called “Ultimate Windows Tweaker” from here:
http://www.thewindowsclub.com/ultimate-windows-tweaker-v2-a-tweak-ui-for-windows-7-vista
It takes away a lot of the pain and frustration.
Despite my misgivings, Windows 7 is turning out to be useable but it will never be as good as 2000.
Is it faster though? In some areas, yes, but not much. Even with a 4 core processor, and 8GB of RAM it is only a little faster than my 5 year old Fujitsu with Core 2 Duo with 3GB.
I had hoped the new processor, 64 Bit architecture and extra memory would have made a significant difference, but it doesn’t. I can only assume the added processor power is consumed by the OS. A bit sad really. I still look forward to the day when I can move to Linux.