Okay, so I am progressing through an upgrade on my laptop (part of the beta testing scenarios) and a "show stopper" for the upgrade seems to be if you have Power Shell 1.0 installed (Win7 comes with Power Shell 2.0.x RC).
So before you try to upgrade over a Vista install and you have Power Shell 1.x installed you will need to remove it via the Control Panel - Programs section and then you can proceed with the upgrade.
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So I was reading the news groups this morning and one of the headers mentioned the need to add a loopback adapter for some VM's they needed to run.
They did end up figuring it out by pulling out the Win2003 Server CD and going through a decent amount of configuration to get it working.
Then, the next thread said to just run: hdwwiz.exe and follow the wizard.
So of course I had to give it a shot and sure enough it worked like a charm.
It seems the icon is gone from the control panel but the functionality is still there.
Give it a shot.
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1 - Drivers. Most of the drivers were installed for me right from MS via Windows Update however I did have to visit the HP page and download a couple of others such as the fingerprint driver. I also needed the RICOH media driver so I installed the Vista x64 driver (since I was running the 64 bit of the OS) and it went on just fine.
2 - Office 2007 Applications. - So it went on without a hitch however Outlook 2007 refused to "talk" to my exchange server and no matter what I tried it simply did not and would not connect to the server. At first I thought it was the firewall so I shut it off completely. That didn't work. I then tried a repair thinking, maybe something didn't install correctly or get configured correctly. Nope. It simply did not want to work at all. This single issue forced me to remove Window 7 from my laptop. I re-imaged back to Vista SP1 since I rely on my Outlook mail way to much to be without it for any length of time. I will be installing Windows 7 into a VM tomorrow and try to determine the problem and the fix. Once I have that accomplished I will be re-installing it back on my laptop.
3 - Performance. - One of the interesting things I noticed when I ran my "performance" to get my "score" I noticed my hard drive came up with a whooping score of... 3.9. I was like... "WTH is that all about?" I found out that one of the first things Windows 7 wants to do is index AND run a Windows Defender scan. Now this was annoying as hell but hey, it's beta and I know Vista does the same thing so my advice to you is to wait until AFTER you install some applications and the indexing has completed then run your performance test and I bet you get a better result.
4 - Drivers - As I said Windows Update downloaded and installed MOST of the drivers I needed including my NVIDIA driver but, two of the drivers were labeled as "preview" and were dated 11/08 so I'm sure as the drivers get better the performance will get better.
5 - ULA - this probably the most talked about and annoying aspect of Vista and I just want to let you all know I experienced only ONE "mother can I?" prompt and I installed about 10 apps one after another. MS has done a fantastic job securing the OS and removing the annoyance of the ULA. Now when I am prompted I actually pay attention to it.
So that's about it for now. As I get more and more into it I will be of course talking about it quite a bit here but let me just say MS, in my opinion, is really trying to nail this release and so far so good.
Just remember it's beta so some things may not work.
I also want to mention MS is very active with this release and has recruited some very dedicated Windows Pro's to answer questions posted over in this group -
social.technet.microsoft.com and yes, yours truly is one of the ones which was recruited to help out and I am more than happy to. Windows 7 is looking pretty good so try it out and if you need help post over there and I'm sure someone will answer your question.