You have read a lot from us about Windows 7 and while most of the write-ups here are about positive experiences, I have had some bad ones lately too. First is the lack of support for older hardware. If you have hardware that has a Vista driver – it won’t necessarily mean it will run in Windows 7.
Realtek, a known soundcard maker for example, released a Windows 7 driver because the Vista driver is not compatible with Windows 7. Until these compatibility issues are resolved, you will see some of your devices showing up as an “Unknown device” in Device Manager.
It could also detect the type of hardware, but a compatible driver might not be available for the manufacturer.
If the manufacturer has no updated drivers, you are in the mercy of Windows compatibility mode. If that option fails, end users will not have a choice but to upgrade to newer compatible hardware.
Another issue that I noticed is the compatibility of some known stable programs to crash after a few seconds of running them. In Winamp below, for example, I was able to trace the issue to an incompatible Winamp plugin. Typical users usually install a bunch of plugins to their programs and will encounter some that will not warn them about incompatibility.
My advice is to take note of those plugins, and if they crash your programs, just uninstall them using Control Panel.
Other issues are more puzzling, like the inconsistent harddisk capacity report as shown below. The lower report shows the right size of the partition but the reported capacity on the upper display does match.
I already tried basic health checks and I didn’t see anything wrong with the disk –Windows reports that this disk is “healthy” but the disk size is wrong. The capacity below should have been 114GB and not 5GB:
I am yet to fix this error and hopefully I will get some help from online communities that are testing Windows 7. I hope that with these tips we post here, you will be more prepared for the issues that you will encounter when you switch to Windows 7.
Ben Carigtan shows you how it’s done.
i installed windows 7 release candidate, and it shows the boot screen,but after that nothing boots, no desktop, no taskbar, all that shows is " Windows 7" and right under it "Client Build 7100". anyone with the solution to this problem, let me know.