Windows 2nd HDD install success and software failures

I had little trouble, downloading, burning a DVD and installing Windows 7 to a second HDD in my Lenovo T61. I bought a new HDD and cloned the old drive to the new, made sure the new drive worked and than reinstalled the old drive, booted to a DVD and installed Win 7 on the old drive which I then pulled and installed in an ultrabay holder in my T61. Voila, easy dual boot situation.

I did disable the Lenovo R and R software so I could easily and quickly get to me start up boot order to change boot drives. No problem on that end.

However Win 7 RC appears to have lots of software issues. IE8 works very slowly and poorly. I should say it works more slowly and poorly than it does in XP 32 bit, which is poorly enough. Interestingly enough it virtually won't allow me to access www.my.yahoo.com which is my home page, yet I get in easily from XP. Would Microsoft deliberately inhibit access to Yahoo.com??? Of course they would.

Office 2007 is said to work well in Win 7. I can get Office 2007 Enterprise to load easily and it does work. However neither Office SP 1 nor SP 2 would load.

But than again I abandoned Vista after being an early adopter when I realized that only Office 2007 was initially supported and 2003 was not. So maybe that is the case here.

I use a fair number of Thinkvantage (proprietary Lenovo software) particularly for WLAN access. The Access Connection install for Vista 64 will not install in Windows 7 V64.

What the hay, I didn't pay anything for it so I won't complain. But like Vista they have a long long way to go to make this thing work.

Perry

 

I have no issues with Yahoo (or My Yahoo) on W7 64bits with either IE8 or FF.

Don't know about Office 2007 but Open Office works fine at the moment.

I am running stock with W7 with no tweak.

cheers ...

 

IE8 works great on my copy of windows 7 yet is buggy and sluggish on Vista. I have Vista on one hard drive and 7 on the other, each recognizes the other hard drive as D and it's self as C. Just typed yahoo.com and it pulled rightup. I haven't used Vista since installing 7 but a few times.

 

Office 2007 works like a champ for me in W7, with all service packs installed. IE8 has no delays, and I can get to all websites. I'm not certain what your issues are. Have you tried just having one drive in your laptop at a time, and installing W7 when just that one drive is installed? I'd try installing W7 again without any out of the ordinary hardware setup (one computer, one drive).

About your other software - have you tried installing in Vista compatibility mode? And, in this case, it's not MS that has a long way to go, it's Lenovo: they will have to update their software to work with W7.

 

Lenovo has released beta drivers for Windows 7. It should resolve issues you have with Access Connections.

http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/site.wss/WIN7-BETA.html

With that said, did you download Windows 7 from Microsoft?

 

The Win 7 beta drivers from Lenovo seems to have corrected most of the sluggish behavior including my.yahoo.com. IE8 seems as snappy as on the XP OS with my internal HDD and that is with the Win 7 boot drive in the Ultrabay where it is not as fast as the internal 7200 WDC.

I have not yet tried a reinstall of Office 2007 and won't until my new WDC 320 GB Scorpio Black gets in tomorrow. I also suspect that older slower 80 GB 5400 rpm HDD I used to install Win 7 may not be completely trouble free.

I will do a clean Win 7 install tomorrow on the new drive and see where we stand.

I still don't see my WLAN Sierra MC5725 driver installed correctly yet. I did download it several times from the Lenovo site but so far no go. Not a problem with 2 HDDs in the system.

Win 7 will definitely be HDD no 2 until all the driver and software compatibility issues are resolved and that is likely a year away.

My PassMark V7.0 benchmarks are nearly identical (on the same machine) whether run on V32 and using the XP Pro OS or run on V64 using the Win 7 OS. That is pretty impressive for such an early release.

PK

 

Windows 7 RC1 isn't an early release - it's a release candidate. That's why things work so well. Since W7 is not a revolutionary step in operating systems, I would expect IBM/Lenovo to patch software/drivers quickly, especially since W7 drivers are already available for your laptop.