 Upgrading To Windows 7 Part Two
Updated
Nov 21, 2009 at 04:10 PM by CaptainPC
Never have I involved myself with any Windows operating system during the first week of its release. I continued to use DOS and a menu setup on my computer for months after the release of Windows 3 back when dinosaurs still roamed the planet. After switching to Windows 3, I promised myself to await the first service pack of all subsequent Windows operating systems before purchasing a new computer or simply upgrading a current one. For a number of reasons I do not care to divulge, I felt that Windows 7 was worth the risk. Suffice it to say, I am glad I upgraded my Toshiba Vista laptop to Windows 7.
After cleaning out junk and software programs I no longer need, and defragging my hard drive, I made a fresh image backup of my drive using Acronis True Image software. Thus armed, I was prepared for the worst, but looking for the best upgrade experience possible. I booted the laptop from the Windows DVD and chose the “custom install” rather than the “in place” install option. The custom install is the closest I could come to a completely clean install using an upgrade package. Although some have said the in place install worked very well for them, I have never been a fan of anything less than a clean install of an operating system. There is less chance for problematic installations with a clean install. The installation took all of 35 minutes to conclude, and Windows 7 now rules my Toshiba.
Windows 7 booted just fine, and all the plumbing appeared to be working. Windows provided some of the drivers my hardware needed to work properly, but some hardware did not function until I installed the Windows 7 drivers from Toshiba’s support page. Toshiba had every Windows 7 driver for all the hardware my Satellite model contained. I downloaded all the drivers the evening before the upgrade. Once I installed the drivers that were needed, my attention turned to the two most important things needed to secure my computer - installing and updating my antivirus and antispyware software (which are Windows 7 compatible) and obtaining the critical Windows 7 updates. There were already several critical updates to be had the very day of Windows 7’s release.
Next, I set my preferred power options under control panel. I like to have my laptop go to sleep when I close the screen lid because it uses less electricity, yet comes to life very quickly when I lift the screen, or at least that is what I was accustomed to it doing. I closed the screen and returned in thirty minutes to check things out and hopefully begin the installation of my software. When I lifted the screen lid, instead of Windows 7, the infamous Blue Screen of Death appeared (BSOD). I was a bit surprised. After all, I have used Vista on this laptop for over a year and have not once seen the BSOD. I suspected a driver bug caused the fault, because drivers were the only software I had installed. The question was which driver caused the problem? I decided to hold off on installing any other software to avoid the introduction of any other variables into the situation, and explored Windows 7 to determine if everything else was working correctly. I explored this and that, and ran software that came with Windows 7, all without any issues. After a day of testing, the sleep issue was the only detectable problem. I was finally able to narrow the problem down to the ATI video driver as the culprit, but I had the latest Windows 7 ATI driver installed. The only other one I could find was two months older and did not improve the situation. However, within another 24 hours, the cavalry arrived in the form of a critical update notification from Windows Update. The critical update happened to be a new ATI video driver. Apparently, Microsoft and ATI found out there was some fault in the current driver and had issued a fix. After updating the driver, the sleep issue improved, and I have yet to see the BSOD again. Kudos to Microsoft and ATI for that quick fix.
The only other problem I have observed was caused by the Toshiba Fingerprint Scanner Driver Utility. For some reason, When I installed Firefox 3.54 the fingerprint utility placed a password add-on in Firefox that caused it to abort every time I attempted to run the browser. After running Firefox in safe mode, I disabled the add-on and all was well.
If you have upgraded to Windows 7 or purchased a new computer with Windows 7 already installed, have you observed any issues? Please comment on any as well as any solutions that have worked for you.
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