Saturday 24 October 2009

Adventures with Windows 7

After an attempt to install a routine update to the wireless driver on my NC10 resulted in complete disaster - not only was the wireless networking broken but the wired Ethernet was gone as well. Even more bizarrely any software to do with networking like the Atheros wireless client programme also completely vanished. Exactly how Samsung managed to achieve this on my behalf is beyond me. Still, on the basis that I would need to do some extensive fecking about with the machine anyway I decided that I might as well go ahead and install Windows 7 instead.

It wasn't an entirely painless exercise although not through any fault of Microsoft. The main problem was creating a bootable USB drive since the NC10 doesn't have an optical drive and downloading all the Samsung Windows 7 drivers. After that it was amazingly trouble free. Even more surprisingly, the vanilla Windows 7 install just worked on the NC10 even before I had installed all the Samsung drivers. Wireless networking the lot. Of course the function keys didn't work but the XP version of Magic Keys runs fine on W7. I did decide to install the Samsung drivers anyway, just in case, although it would have been interesting to see how things would have gone if I hadn't.

I admit it was a bit sluggish at first, for some reason it had decided to enable the Aero theme, even a swift poke through the secret BIOS settings to give it more video memory didn't help but after a bit of twiddling with the performance settings I think it's fairly similar to XP. One thing I will say is that the wireless networking seems a lot more stable, fingers crossed, the connection hasn't dropped for no apparent reason like it used to with XP. So I reckon it's worth upgrading for that alone.

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