Archive for the ‘windows’ Category

Win Vista -> Win 7 upgrade

Sunday, August 23rd, 2009

Yesterday I upgraded from Win Vista to Win 7. The process itself takes quite a while, but is quite smooth. All your settings and and programs will be preserved. (Doing a backup before upgrading is recommended, though)
My windows partition was quite full before the upgrade. You need 16GB of free space for the upgrade. It was quite a struggle to free so much space. To my suprise after the upgrade 33GB of 70GB were free. So Win 7 seams to need less HD space. All drivers work after the upgrade. I didn’t have to install any new. Well exept one.. the tap driver. It is needed to create virtual network interface cards. This might render openvpn unsable. We’ll see in october when I need openvpn to access the internet inside the university. But I will probably use my Ubuntu there…so who cares?
Ok there is another problem concerning the ext drivers, which allow me to access partitions of my linux installation(and my external HD). You can install them in windows vista compatibilty mode. But upon reboot the partitions will be gone and you have to reinstall the drivers. This could get quite annoying. But well… I’m planning to build a fileserver, so that windows can access my external HD via SMB. To sum up:

  • smooth upgrade procedure from win vista to win 7
  • win7 needs less HD space
  • win tap drivers not working
  • ext drivers not fully working

Windows 7 on Virtualbox

Sunday, January 11th, 2009

Microsoft has just released the public beta of Windows 7, which will the next OS in the Windows family, being released 2010. It is based on Vista, with some features added, the was reordered a little and they say it performs better. Instead of installing it on an separate PC, so that the Beta will not compromise the productive system you can easily install it using the great software called Virtualbox. Virtualbox allows you to virtualize an operating system(OS), this means you can run a separate OS “just in a window”. Which doesn’t risk you host system at all. Simply add a new system to virtualbox, attach the downloaded ISO-file of windows 7 as a CD/DVD drive and start that system.
You will not be able to install the Virtualbox Guest Editions, which would bring you features like seamless mode, or the integration of you mouse pointer. You network device won’t be working after installation, to fix this click an Devices->”Install Guest Additions”. Then a CD-ROM drive should be mounted. Now you can simply search for the ethernet device drivers on the drive, through the windows device manager. Now you can enjoy your normal internet connection within you windows 7. Here are some pictures of windows 7 on the virtualbox: