I had an epiphany. I realized that there’s a perfect place to put the copy of Windows 7 I downloaded a couple of days ago. (Karen can now remove the barricades from around the Mac.) I decided to play with the house’s money. I asked our IT guy Eugene — who’s only the most patient person on the planet — if he could gin me up a PC with a working DVD drive. He produced … The Frankenbox. Part Compaq, part Dell. All spare parts. Oatmeal and black. Very 2005. And totally underpowered according to the Win7 specs. I gave it a shot anyway.

Installation was pure Microsoft: took 1 hour, plus 2 reboots. The installer immediately took issue with the partition of the hard drive, so I had to delete it and create a new one. But it worked. It. Worked. Bahahahahahaha!

What do I think, after 2.5 hours of work?

The Good: It runs peppy with 512 MB of RAM and an old Pentium 3 processor running at 730MHz. No complaints there. Takes about 2 minutes to boot, which by Windows standards is quite acceptable.

The Bad: I’m stuck at 640×480 resolution, even though I downloaded the latest Vista driver for my monitor. (Typical Microsoft driver issue. Will they never learn?) I get a Blue Screen of Death when I cold-start the PC. The PC auto-restarts after the BSoD and successfully logs into Windows. I also can’t play solitaire because of video acceleration issues. (The cards move like an inch an hour. It reminds me of when I used to play Uno with the kids when they were real little. One game takes a week.) No Aero interface, either.

The Ugly: It’s still Windows. What can I say?

UPDATE, 2:30 pm – Flash and Firefox installed with no problems and work fine. Google Chrome crashes every time I try to connect to a URL.

UPDATE, 5/11 – Chrome seems to work fine now. Beats me why.

Submitted by: Dan Giancaterino, Education Services Manager
on May 07, 2009 - 12:48 pm

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