When Windows Vista was launched I was just starting my Middle Tennessee and Northern Alabama Virtual Tour company. I was advised to avoid Vista at that time because of the propriatery virtual tour and photo stitching software that I would be using.
Fast forward a couple of years and I still have only touched one system running Vista. I’m going to be a bit more brave with Windows 7. I downloaded the beta over the weekend and installed it on my old system.
My test system is a home brew box vintage 2000 with an Asus main board, an Athlon XP 2200+ processor and the mininum recommended 1GB of memory. I thought this would test whether the system requirements were more forgiving than for Vista as Microsoft clamis.
I did a fresh install on the system partition and it installed without a hitch. I had a major problem right off the bat. The ethernet card wasn’t recognized. It was a Wal-Mart/Linksys/Network Everywhere card. After some research I found out that the drivers were never even developed for Vista.
Luckily I had a couple of other NIC cards in the closet that I had picked up at a computer show out of the two dollar bin. The first one wowrked. I’m not sure what the make of the card is, but Windows 7 recognized it right away.
Ok, so now I’m on the net and I have a clean device manager, but my display is not optimal. My card is an Nvidia GeForce4 4200 with 128mb of memory which should be adequate to run the more advanced features of Windows 7 beta. I guess Nvidia hasn’t bothered to update the drivers for this card for Vista/7 because all I’m getting is the “Standard VGA” card driver. That means 1024×768 max and the refresh rate is noticeably slow.
Summary: It seems stable, it connected to my home network easily and I like the window snapping feature. I just wish I could find drivers for the video card. i really don’t want to sink any money into this old system just to try out Wwindows 7 beta. If anybody can help I’d appreciate you leaving a comment.
I plan on posting again on my Windows 7 beta experience.
Brett
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