Onlydarksets » Windows 7

Win7 drivers available for HP dv2z

onlydarksets — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 01:51:48 +0000

HP released the Windows 7 drivers for the dv2z-1100 recently. Here are the 64-bit links. I’ve noticed a little bit of a difference since I installed them last night. The biggest issue with the Vista drivers was the laptop would often fail to shut down or go to standby with a SD card in the slot. The Win7 drivers seem to fix that.

The only issue I had was that, after installing the BIOS update, I got a piracy notice when I restarted. Of course, this copy of Windows 7 came from MSDN, so I’m pretty confident it’s legit. However, I rebooted and I haven’t seen the message since.

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Windows 7, Bitlocker, and a new MB

onlydarksets — Sat, 12 Sep 2009 01:57:34 +0000

I had to replace the MB on my laptop (the GPU imploded, taking pretty much everything with it). Afterward, it would POST and boot, but I had two issues:

I had to re-enter the BitLocker key each time the computer booted or resumed from standby or hibernate, and
It was no longer activated and wouldn’t activate, with error 80072f8f.

The activation issue turned out to be simple – the clock on the MB was completely wrong, which causes activation to automatically fail. Setting the clock (manually or via internet update) solved the problem.

The BitLocker problem sucks a bit more, though. The only “fix” I could find is to decrypt the drive and re-encrypt it. BitLocker would prefer that you take the following route:

Anticipate catastrophic failure
Temporarily disable BitLocker
Fix the error
Re-enable BitLocker

I skipped step #1, so I was SOL. My bad.

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Installing Windows 7 release candidate on ASUS 1000HE

onlydarksets — Fri, 22 May 2009 05:42:15 +0000

I picked up the ASUS 1000HE (in black, thank you, not pink) as a secondary and vacation laptop. It’s light, it’s got a slightly faster processor, and it has a ton of storage. I’ve been running Win7 RC for about a month, though, and I’ve read that the 1000HE can run that – no problem.

Well, it can. It even supports full Aero, which is a pretty impressive feat by both ASUS and Microsoft.

In fact, out of the box, everything except ACPI and the advanced touchpad features (and, of course, ASUS’s proprietary key shortcuts), but the XP drivers work for both. However, it doesn’t have an optical drive, and none of the instructions out there for installing from a USB drive are complete. This (I believe) is complete.

Get the beta
Create a bootable USB drive with the beta. A few notes:
1. Use a USB hard drive, not a SD reader and SD card. The latter cannot be marked as active, so you can’t boot from it. I didn’t try putting the SD card in the memory card slot in the 1000HE to see if that way works, though.
2. The partition must be formatted FAT32, which is limited to 128GB. If your drive is larger, you need to either resize the existing partition and create a smaller one (~15GB is more than enough), or nuke the whole thing, create a small partition. If it’s not FAT32, you will get a boot error and the helpful option of “Ctrl-Alt-Del to continue”.
3. If you don’t make the partition with the Win7 files active, you will just get a flashing cursor.
Install Windows 7 from the USB drive
1. Turn the 1000HE off
2. Plug it into the LEFT USB port (as in, not the ports on the right side)
3. Turn the 1000HE on
4. Immediately start pressing F2 to get into the BIOS. Press it about 2 times per second until you see the EEE screen come up.
5. Once you are in the BIOS, go to the Boot menu (press the right arrow key)
6. Select “Hard Disk Drives” and press enter
7. Select “1st Drive” and press enter
8. Select the USB:xxxxxxxx option and press enter
9. Press Escape
10. Select “Boot Device Priority” and press enter
11. Select “1st Boot Device” and press enter
12. Select the USB:xxxxxxxx option and press enter
13. Press F10 to save and restart
When the Win7 installer reboots, you need to either unplug the USB drive or switch the BIOS back to the HDD
NOTE: There now appear to be Windows 7 drivers available – just select Windows 7 as the OS. I haven’t verified this, but it’s worth a shot.
Download the following drivers (select Eee Family | Eee PC | 1000HE – then, when the box pops up, select WinXP as the OS)
1. ATK | Advanced Configuration ans Power Interface Drive for WIN XP (currently v4.00.0010)
2. Utilities | ASUS Instant Key Utility for Windows XP (currently v1.08)
3. TouchPad | Touchpad Driver Version 7.0.4.3 (this enables multi-touch support)
Install the LAN drivers

Done.

A few points:

Right-click on the taskbar, select Properties, and check the “Use small icons” box. The few extra pixels really do make a difference.
For some reason, ASUS’s hotkey utility throws an error on startup sometimes. You can ignore it. It’s saying that you can’t use ASUS’s hotkey program to switch resolutions.
Also, you can set the two hotkeys at the top by running EeeInstantKey from the start menu.

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Windows 7, Hosted Exchange, and Outlook 2007 = FAIL

onlydarksets — Mon, 11 May 2009 21:50:03 +0000

My work email is on hosted Exchange via a GroupSpark reseller. You can tell if you are on GroupSpark if you use “ActiveSync.MyOutlookOnline.com” as your AS server.

I have no idea what changed from Vista to XP, but I can no longer login using Outlook 2007. It has something to do with Active Directory, but even using the correct credentials format (DOMAIN\AD_USERNAME) I get an error. (If you are interested, the correct domain for GroupSpark is “MAIL”).

If you find yourself in this situation, Outlook 2003 works fine. Plus, it reminds you of how much better Outlook 2007 is.

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Windows 7 shortcut keys

onlydarksets — Sun, 03 May 2009 18:05:36 +0000

There are a bunch of new shortcut keys in Win7. Here’s a good list. My favorites are the arrow keys arranging windows on the screen.

Plus one they don’t have listed:

Windows + B: Navigate the system tray with the keyboard.

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Upgrading to Windows 7

onlydarksets — Sat, 02 May 2009 14:03:35 +0000

I just finished “upgrading”. Actually, I had to do a clean install, because I couldn’t clear enough space off of my C: drive. Unless you have about 15GB of free space on C: – don’t bother. I had a 30GB partition for C:, but 6.5GB was in winsxs, another 4GB was in Installers, and another 12GB in Program Files, ProgramData, and Users. Every time I freed up a couple of GBs, the installer said it needed more. I finally gave up.

One other hiccup: if you are running Vista Enterprise, the installer says there is no upgrade path to Windows 7 Ultimate (which is the only version you can download right now) – this does not appear to be true. You can “trick” the installer into thinking you are running Vista Business, and then it will let you upgrade. Via MSFN Forums:

Before inserting the Windows [7] Ultimate CD
Go to, Start, Run: and type: regedit.exe
Go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion
Change the key : ProductName from “Windows Vista ™ Enterprise” to “Windows Vista ™ Business”
Change the key: EditionID from “Enterprise” to “Business”

Do not restart

The instructions are for going to Vista Ultimate, but it worked fine for me going to Windows 7 Ultimate.

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Free Windows 7 for Vista users?

onlydarksets — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 02:09:38 +0000

http://tech.yahoo.com/news/zd/20090212/tc_zd/237037

Rest assured, the next iteration of Windows is on its way, but when and how? The latest rumor making the rounds in the blogosphere is that Microsoft will provide Vista users with a free upgrade to Windows 7 when it becomes available.

Yeah, right. If that happens, I’ll eat my hat.

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ScanPST.exe location

onlydarksets — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 17:42:06 +0000

I just upgraded to Vista Enterprise SP1, and I found that my backup PST was corrupted. Outlook told me to run ScanPST.exe, but didn’t bother telling me where it was. According to the KB article, it’s located in the Common Files directory. However, with Microsoft Office 2007 Enterprise, I found it here:

C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office12

Obviously this isn’t an insurmountable obstacle, but hopefully this will help.

UPDATE: One commentor found it in yet another location. C:\Program Files\Common Files\System\MSMAPI\1033

UPDATE #2: For x64, substitute “Program Files (x86)” for “Program Files” in the above paths. Thanks, Travis!

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