Some Windows 7 RTM Observations Part I

Here are a few of my finding on Windows 7 RTM as I have installed and/or upgraded on some of my test systems:

Dell Latitude E6400 with Windows RC1 64bit formatted for a clean install of Windows 7 RTM 64bit. You can upgrade from Windows 7 beta or RC1 to RTM by doing the following, however it is NOT recommended:

• Extract the contents of the RTM iso to an empty directory.
• Go to sources folder and open cversion.ini in notepad.
• Change MinClient to 7000.0 and MinServer to 7000.0 and save the file.
  
• Run setup from this directory and choose to upgrade

Clean install took about 20 minutes and weighs in at 15GB with default settings (not much to configure anyways). Installed almost all drivers except 3. Wireless and wired network interfaces worked out of the box. Even though Windows 7 detects most of your drivers go to your manufacturers site and try to download and install the latest drivers. If Windows 7 drivers are not out try Vista version of same version and bits.

Apple MacBook Pro running clean install of Windows 7 RTM 64bit in VMWare Fusion. The VM has 1GB of RAM and 1 CPU core assigned. Installed in under 20 minutes. Runs very smooth!

Next I will be upgrading a Vista Ultimate 32 bit to Windows 7 RTM Ultimate 32 bit. It currently has 32GB of used space, let's see how it goes.

Some customizations I make
As soon as I am on the desktop I make a few customizations depending on the role of the machine, I am testing a corporate environment machine and a stand alone so the configurations are different. Here are some I do right off the bat:

• Notification Area - I set this to always show all icons and notifications on the taskbar. One of the changes to Windows 7 is that you can set the behavior of certain icons on your taskbar. I like seeing all the icons so I set it like this. Often you are troubleshooting a home users machine and see the taskbar almost reaching the start button!
• Stop and/or set services I do not use to manual or disabled. I have two blogs on Windows 7 services. A full list, and the services you can disable or set to manual
  

Issues so far
VMWare vSphere Client 4.0 does not work on Windows 7 RTM 64bit running in a VM in fusion, it does work on a Windows XP VM in fusion. It does not work on a host Windows 7 RC1 64 bit install either. The program runs from the short cut. However when you try to connect you get an error "Error parsing the server "" "clients.xml" file. Login will continue, contact your system administrator." Immediately followed by this error: "The type initializer for 'VirtualInfrastructure.Utils.HttpWebRequestProxy' threw an exception." Anyone else seeing this issue?

Update
I found a solution for the vSphere issue on WIndows 7 and posted here.

Till Next Time,
Jorge Orchilles