Meiousei running Windows 7
I finally got around to upgrading my laptop from Vista to Windows 7. So far I like it and a lot of the quirks that were in Vista doesn’t seem to be apparent in 7. It took me a long time to finally convince myself to upgrade to Windows 7 because I wasn’t sure if Windows 7 came with the drivers that were needed for my laptop, and Sony hasn’t put out any Windows 7 drivers. Which doesn’t necessarily mean that the XP/Vista drivers won’t work… I just don’t like taking a wild guess and possible be wrong.
In the end, I had to install 5 drivers after I figured out what Windows 7 supported and what it didn’t. 2 were for the audio/media buttons (don’t ask me why there are two, there just are…), one for for the track pad (the Windows 7 one sorta worked, but I didn’t have the scrolling thing working on it), another was for the webcam, and the final was the audio driver for mic+HDMI support.
There are plenty of good things that I like about Windows 7, once you get past DEP and Windows Defender. The Desktop Sidebar (called simply gadgets in 7), is much more efficient than it was in Vista and you can move each item to anywhere on the desktop. Right now the sidebar process is taking up 46MB of RAM and 219MB of VRAM (I have 4GB total of each), before I was seeing 100+MB of RAM and 350+MB of VRAM on Vista with the same amount of items in the sidebar. I like how the taskbar and tray are now setup, there is no longer a quick launch bar but you can “pin” items onto the taskbar which serves the exact same purpose. You can change the taskbar to look like how it did in XP/Vista, but I kinda like having just the icon there. I also like how Windows now supports desktop wallpaper rotation by default now. Even with a ton of images for it to look through, it doesn’t take anymore RAM or processing power (noticeably). I don’t like how 7 doesn’t support multiple desktops yet… Common Windows, you’re the only (popular) OS that doesn’t support it!
All in all, it’s a pretty nice OS and I hope it lasts for a couple years so that I don’t have to upgrade again…
November 5th, 2009 at 12:50
Yeah, I definitely understand not wanting to take a wild guess and be wrong. I to waited awhile to upgrade to 7 as well because I didn’t want to mess up any of my laptops good quality’s such as the fingerprint reader and my touch sensitive media console which allows me to control volume, play, stop, skip, etc.. Everything worked out great with the upgrade. I am very satisfied with window 7 overall.
November 5th, 2009 at 13:56
Did you have to install the drivers separately or did W7 come with them preinstalled?
November 6th, 2009 at 00:15
Well, what I did was download and install windows 7 adviser and it ran a scan to tell if my laptop was ready for the upgrade. The software let me know which drivers I had to update and which ones were fine. Most of my drivers were up to date though. The only one I had to install the update for was the fingerprint reader driver. Other than that Windows 7 took care of the rest.
November 6th, 2009 at 00:20
But basically I install that one driver separately. Then upgraded to W7.
November 6th, 2009 at 22:57
Wow, so all of your audio buttons and webcam and stuff worked fine without installing the needed drivers? That’s pretty nice.
That reminds me… I need to burn a W7 disk for Sean and Jaron…
November 9th, 2009 at 14:14
Yeah everything went pretty smooth. I was happy it did.