Windows 7 on Latitude E6400

I installed Windows 7 64 bit yesterday. It's running well and looks like it's better than vista on the whole.

Like most others, I too had a bit of work looking for and installing drivers. The Intel chipset driver doesn't install on it's own though it's compatible with Vista x64. So that and some other drivers were installed manually through the device manager.

No problems with the IMSM driver which I downloaded from the Intel site.

The bluetooth drivers had to be installed in compatibility mode.

The Nvidia driver is the WDDM pre-release version on WU. Surprisingly, 185.20 was deemed not suitable (not incompatible) compared to the WU one which is 179.23. With this driver, the WEI for Aero is a very disappointing 2.6, lower than in Vista 32! Does anyone know why?

I now have triple boot with Vista 32 on Disk 0, W7 and Ubuntu (Wubi) on disk 1 (eSATA). The last two were installed just days apart and I continue to be more pleased with Ubuntu than with W7.

Ubuntu installed automatically or with minimal user interaction, all the correct drivers and offered all the latest updates immediately. It's just so responsive and light-weight! It's a pity I won't be using it as my primary OS as some software I use on Windows isn't found on it and also that I'm more used to Windows and Office 2007 now. Office 2007 is one cost that quite justifiable because you can easily see the improvements and it works better than 2003, unlike the Vista as to XP.

Lastly but not least, no BSOD or crashes so far on W7. Everything works well. I can't test the improved battery life since W7 is installed on the external drive that too uses some power and obviously can't be disconnected.

 

btw, i know both what the issue with the WEI and how to make it "stop". If you go into device manager, and look at the properties for your hard drive, you will notice that under policies, write caching is enabled by default. if you uncheck this, your WEI score will return to whatever it was before. (for me, the hdd went from 2.9 to 5.9). the interesting part about this is that write caching should IMPROVE the perceived performance of the drive, not make it worse, so it seems to be an issue with WinSAT/WEI. either way, up to you guys if you want write caching enabled or disabled. i chose to disable it and have not had the decreased performance that it "could" cause being disabled. complete with better data integrity, unless i really feel slowed down, im sticking it that way.

 

on another note, would people mind posting averages for the following? (please test when you are not doing anything that should be caching much to the disk.)
1. % Idle Time
2. Disk Reads/sec
3. Disk Writes/sec

to do this, type performance monitor into the search, and open the monitor. add these (they are under logicalDisk).

on a related note, what anti-virus software is everyone using? I just realized that symantec endpoint protection was dropping my idle time to 80% (although it may have been scanning actively, im not sure). on reenabling it, it seems that it must have been, because now enabled, im still sitting at 97% idle, roughly.

 

on an unrelated note, anyone have any idea what my "unknown device" might be? i have installed the latest intel matrix and chipset drivers, and i have NOT installed any security drivers, because they really messed up my first install, so i have a yellow bang next to broadcom USH w/swipe sensor. i installed BT, and note that I did not have to do it in compatibility mode. I installed the BT for 410 (since thats the one i got, and it doesnt seem to do an OS check).

 

Card reader?

I'm not running an AV right now. Surfing habits do more than AV software does. I am running spyware protection though. Spybot and Ad-Aware.

Greg

 

it might be the card reader -- is that included in the security drivers? (its late, im tired.)

 

on a very important note, has anyone yet noticed a program hang and windows 7 being completely and totally unable to kill it? I have a hunch what my particular issue might be caused by, but it is bigger concern more generally. by totally unable to kill it I mean end process, end process tree, and admin level "taskkill /f" command. the particularly interesting part is that it gives a message of success when you attempt to force kill, but the program/task does not actually stop.

 

I mean the SD card reader actually, it has it's own driver.

Greg

 

would you mind linking it?

actually, i am pretty sure win7 already installed it. feel free to link anyway, but does anyone have any other idea what the unknown device might be?

 

Here you go: http://support.dell.com/support/dow...1&impid=-1&formatcnt=1&libid=27&fileid=258426

Greg