[General Topics] Menneisyys:
Total Commander's plug-in window – several buttons [on the right] are missing. It should look like the following:

(a shot without any default zoom)

1.1 Drivers; common problems

As a rule of thumb, W7 has a far wider choice of both built-in (offline, coming on the DVD and, therefore, installed at install time) and online (accessible via automatic (!) driver search) drivers than Vista. Just an example: while I was in no way able to make the Wi-Fi card work in either my a31p or TC1100, it worked (almost) out of the box under Windows 7.

You can even use most of your XP drivers, keeping in mind you always run them in XP SP2 compatibility mode and as an administrator. I've encountered far fewer driver problems under W7 than under Vista.

1.1.1	The video acceleration problem

Currently, the biggest W7 problem you may also face is that of the video acceleration. On many notebooks (more precisely, built-in video hardware), trying to make use of the video acceleration features results in an immediate Blue Screen Of Death (BSOD) crash or just a system hang. This not only happens when you try to run 3D games, but also when playing back videos in most video players, even including the built-in Windows Media Player – they also use acceleration features of the video card.

If you do encounter these kinds of problems, you'll want to go to Display / Change Display Settings / Advanced Settings / Troubleshoot / Change Settings and, there, just set the slider to the second position:

Note that this will severely degrade not only gaming, but also 2D and video rendering speed. This also means you won't be able to enjoy the really cool visual effects of W7 – which are automatically enabled when W7 notices it runs on a sufficiently quick and capable machine. To do this (and to get a performance estimation), go to Control Panel / Performance Information and Tools (it's under System and Security / System / Check your computer's Windows Experience Index base score if you don't use the "All Control Panel Items" feature of Control Panel) and run the test. For example, on my t42p, I got (for a 2004 model) pretty nice results; this is why animation was enabled after finishing the test:

On a device with a non-acceleration-capable card (in this case, my TC1100), you'll always get 1.0 for the 3D acceleration index:

Theoretically, it could be possible to "hack" the so-called "reference" drivers of both ATI and Nvidia (the two major players on the accelerated video hardware field) with "Mobility Modder". You might want to check out THIS for ATI [like the FireGL GPU's in the p-series Thinkpads] and THIS for Nvidia [like the GPU in the TC1100] hacks. Nevertheless, neither of them worked on my ATI-based a31p or Nvidia-based TC1100; see my a machine-specific reports in Chapter 2 for more info. You, however, may have better luck.

1.2 Generic software compatibility issues

In general, most of the (legacy) software titles I've thrown at W7 worked. Some of the most notable exceptions are as follows:

1.2.1 Virtual CD/DVD software

Most of the virtual CD/DVD mounter software titles (which are realy useful, should you want to for example install an application in a disk image – for example, .ISO – file without burning it on a real CD / DVD) refuse to work. For example, both Alcohol 52% Free Edition 1.9.8.7117 FE (also admitted by the Alcohol folks themselves) and DAEMON Tools Lite v4.30.3 32/64 Bits (with SPTD 1.56) have major issues. In my tests, however, PowerISO 4.3 turned out to be working just fine. Too bad it has no free versions to just mount a disk image, unlike Alcohol's 52%...

Some folks at the thinkpads.com forums also stated VirtualCD v9 is compatible with W7; I haven't tested this myself.

1.2.2 WinPcap

Unfortunately, WinPcap (The Windows Packet Capture Library) doesn't work either, not even the latest 4.1 Beta 5. This means software titles depending on this driver won't really work either. The most prominent example of them is WMRecorder, the, in my very thorough streaming media saving tests, best title of all (version 12.3 was really able to capture everything I've thrown it at) – you won't be able to use it in ADA mode, only in PRO, which is far from being the best.

That is, for the time being, you'll need to switch back to XP (or Vista) to back up your multimedia strems.

1.3 Installation on top of older (Windows) operating systems

1.3.1 Activation, serial numbers

Currently, it seems, every beta tester is eligible to get five different serial numbers for testing. Should you need all of them (if you for example are afraid of running out of the 2.5 million requests before realizing you need to install W7 on another PC), just make sure you refresh (F5) the W7 beta download page where the first serial number is displayed.

1.3.2 Multiboot

If you install W7 on another partition (or hard disk), the old operating system will still be accessible and listed in the new boot loader W7 installs.

A notable exception is Linux, including "hacked" OS X versions (see THIS for more info on setting up the latter on ordinary WinTel PC's). If you install W7 on a PC with, for example, the OS X boot loader being the active, it will no longer be visible.