Yeah, how in the world can I be saying that when Windows 7 is getting virtually nothing but accolades while Vista is still reviled by most? Well, for one of my machines, it is real simple. Win7 keeps bluescreening whereas Vista appears to be rock solid.
I have a two and a half year old Dell Dimension E521 for the family PC that shipped with Vista Ultimate. Last week, I reformatted the hard drive and loaded Windows 7 Ultimate (final bits, x64) and was encouraged it loaded up so well. I had buy a new WiFi USB dongle because there doesn't seem to be much of anything for the old Linksys WG111 that I have, but that was no big deal. Vista didn't have drivers for it either and the last thing Linksys created for it was some beta Vista stuff in 2006.
The first thing I noticed is the built in SD/MMC/CF/MS/XD/(insert half a dozen more card types here) reader wasn't recognized by the OS. It wasn't that there were no drivers in the Device Manager, it simply didn't exist at all as far as the OS was concerned. I thought maybe there were some drivers on Dell's site and I'd poke around with that later.
Then it bluescreened. Well, first I had a bit of a warning. Horizontal lines started showing up on the screen and the OS got jerky. Fine. I rebooted and began the hunt for better video drivers. It came with a GeForce 7300 LE chip and NVidia has some beta drivers for Win7, so I loaded them. No joy. Same thing. Because I had spent some time messing with the WG111 drivers I figured I might have contaminated the OS somehow (the beta Vista drivers wouldn't uninstall for anything) and since I had no time invested in customizing the OS, I just reformatted the hard drive again and started over.
No good. It bluescreened again, then once more with NVidia's new drivers. So now I figured maybe it was the x64 build on this machine and it would be happier with the 32bit version. I loaded that up and got further along in loading stuff. Got the WiFi going, restored my internet shortcuts, loaded Office 2007 Ultimate. Then it bluescreened on me again. Loaded the NVidia Win7 drivers but all for nothing. It bluescreened again. At this point I am seriosly thinking it is hardware releated and began investigating a new machine. You can get a decent family PC for $500 or less if gaming isn't your thing.
However, I wanted to give it one more go but this time with Vista. I loaded that up. Amazingly, the card reader was recognized by the OS - no drivers necessary. How could Microsoft actually remove support for hardware that Vista supported out of the box?
I've now had Vista running for nearly a week with no bluescreens at all. I am happy I don't need to spend $500 for a new machine, but saddened that Win7 just won't work on this machine. I've been using Win7 in beta, RC and final bits on my netbook since April 2009 and am chomping at the bit to get it loaded on my Dell M65 Precision laptop that I use for work - I just have a TON of ODBC connections I need so save the config's for and then plan on at least 12-24 hrs of tweaking to get it usable again.
It is a real shame because I was excited about the home networking feature that would allow my machines to recognize the were on the home LAN and automatically use my home printer instead of my work printer, plus file sharing is supposed to be much easier.
If anyone has an E521 with the GeForce 7300 LE video card I'd be interested to hear your experiences with Win7.
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