Hello, Windows 7!
By“Sweet dreams are made of these/who am I to disagree?”
Well, it didn’t take long..2.5 weeks in fact, before Windows 7 finds itself once again on my trusty Dell Inspiron 6400/E1505 (See “Goodbye, Windows 7”).
What happened?
As the saying goes: ‘Life Happens’. By that I mean certain issues arose, likely of my doing, but in the end necessity won the day and Windows 7 Professional is back, up and running. And running nicely, I should add, but doesn’t every fresh install seem to be the fastest ever? Windows XP was running fine, but something was grinding it to a halt.
Was it a program? Was it one of the numerous tweaks I applied?
The Internet connection came to have a long lag time, like a great punt in football that seems to hang in the air forever. It didn’t matter which browser I tried: IE8, Firefox, Chrome, there was this huge delay before things started happening. Then there was the ‘right-click freeze-up’. Whenever I right-clicked a file (for example to delete it), Windows Explorer would freeze, locking the entire system, rendering my Dell to doorstop status. The good ol’ three finger salute (invoking the ever-ready Task Manager) would solve the problem, but it got tedious after awhile. I mean, I am a right-click kind of guy. Many are not conversant with right-click, but it is my little helper.
Then there was an audio problem, which happened under Vista as well, but I never recalled it being such a nuisance with XP. It is an intermittent ‘crackling’ lasting only a few seconds, but enough to spoil the listening experience every few minutes. Apparently it is a known issue with this model of Dell, and there was a software work-around with Vista (Vista Anti-lag), but it does not work under XP.
Probably the ultimate reason I went back to Windows 7 is that I needed to install or restore a ‘clean’ image to test out my complimentary copy of Acronis Backup & Security that I received last week. (Acronis Backup & Security 2010 combines three essential elements into one product: local backup, full Internet security, online backup.)
I already had Acronis True Image Home 2010 installed as well as another antivirus product, and Acronis did not recommend installing overtop of either of these two products, so rather than uninstall them both (and still have the nagging problems as related earlier), I opted for a clean install of Windows 7.
I must say that installing Windows 7 is a joy: hardly any user interaction, few reboots, all your stuff moved into a Windows.old folder (if you had a pre-existing Windows installation) and in about 20 to 30 minutes you are practically ready to go. There were about 65MB of updates waiting for me, but that was not a problem with a high-speed connection. There was a touchpad driver I needed to install to get the scrolling feature to work, and a missing ‘base system device’ driver that the Windows 7 trouble-shooter found online and installed for me.
Then, I ran a Disk Cleanup, deleted the Windows.old folder (I already had my files backed up to my D: partition), defragmented, then used Acronis True Image Home 2010 Recovery Disk to create an image of this clean install for use in the future, rather than reinstalling Windows 7 again.
This time around, I am going to be careful as to installing certain ‘optimization’ programs, which I think contributed to XP’s erratic behaviour. At any rate, I recommend regular backups and use of an imaging program like Acronis. Setting a restore point is also good practice.
Now I am ready to install Acronis Backup & Security and begin testing it. Watch for a review soon!
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I’ll probably be installing Windows 7 on the same model laptop (Dell 6400), and from what you told me there doesn’t seem to be any problems. It currently has Vista, so I’m looking forward to replacing it with Windows 7.
I’m with you on the optimizing programs. Sometimes I wonder if they are as good as they say. To me, the best optimization I can do is knowing what I install and how it affects the system.
Thanks for commenting on this, Paul. I do like my Dell 6400, and as long as I am careful installing programs and keeping startup progs to a bare minimum, I should be OK.