Windows 7 – First learning points

Installed Windows 7 RC2 for the first time yesterday.

In Virtual Machine

First installation in a VirtualBox – which worked fine except for the VirtualBox graphics adapter not being accelerated – which meant Solitaire ran extremely slow. Apart from that – no problems.

Dual/triple booting

Once the gut feeling was OK, i made room for Windows 7 on my laptop that already holds a Windows XP and an Ubuntu 9.04 partition. Installing Windows 7 leaves the existing OS’es alone, but the boot manager only supports Windows file-systems. My old GRUB bootloader would allow me to choose between booting Linux or Windows, but after the Windows 7 install, i could no longer boot Linux. The partition is still on the disk, but not in the MS bootloader. A bunch of hours later that was fixed – using the Ubuntu installer, GRUB was installed again – but I am still not quite satisfied; From GRUB i can boot into the MS bootloader. I now have two steps:

1. Choose between booting Linux and Windows and (if choosing Windows)
2. Choose between Windows XP and 7

I’ll try to fix this soon, but the priority of fixing this just dropped as I can now boot into all 3 OS’es.

One other thing: 3G USB modem

The last thing I needed was to the my 3 – 3G Huawei modem to work. In short: It didn’t – and it may not be because of Windows 7. Apparently the modem needs some Adobe Flash stuff and the drivers on the modems flashmemory are not Flash 10-compatible. 3 in Denmark knows and offers a download to fix the issue – It did the trick for me.

This post is my first written in Windows 7. Will post further findings..

Oh – and the wallpapers are beeeee-aaaaa-utiful!