I shall now detail my experience for you totalitarian war mongers who hate freedom and love fascism.
I'm currently writing this piece from my freshly installed Windows 7 x64 box.
The install process:
I performed the install by downloading an ISO image from the MSDN Subscriber's downloads section. Then I burned a hard copy to a DVD.
That initial download cost me a dozen hours of raging frustration, hair pulling, and screaming at invisible communists.
1. If you ever attempt to install Windows 7 and see a loading screen that looks like Vista's boot screen, that is Microsoft's way of informing you that your disk image/disk is corrupt. (Thanks for making the error so clear and understandable you f'n fookers)
If you see this when booting off of the Windows 7 DVD, stop what you are doing and either return the DVD or download and burn a new ISO image again, because the image is fooked:
I learned this the hard way after ramming my cawk into electrical outlets in frustration for several god damn azzmastering pile of snot azz crap hours.
The Windows 7 boot animation looks like this when its working correctly:
Obviously the first few images I attempted to install were bad, therefore no matter what I did I could not complete the install. I learned a few very very important lessons from this.
1. If you get a "Vista" boot animation, your disk is fooked.
2. If you get a "a required CD/DVD driver is missing" error, your disk is probably fooked.
3. When installing Windows 7, you should ensure your SATA ports are set to AHCI and native mode.
4. The Windows 7 setup partition manager is a pile of crap that will not allow you to set a partition as a system/primary partition. If you attempt to change the partitions on your hard-drive using the Win7 partition utility provided during the setup, just know that if you delete your system partition, you will not be able to create a new one. I obviously did this, the only way I had to get around the problem was to blow out all the partitions on the drive, then reboot. Win7 was smart enough to figure out that if there was only one blank partition, that's where it should put the OS. Also, disconnect any external USB drives during this process.
5. Use an SHA1 hash checking utility on the image PRIOR to burning it. Then have your DVD writing software verify the burned image after you burn it. Any errors in the download image or the burn image will cause you mega (and I mean mega) problems when you go to install. Microsoft provides the SHA1 hash for their DVDs on the MSDN website next to where you download it. For those of you installing from an original windows DVD you bought from the store, you'll probably avoid these potential issues.
After several hours of slamming my panis into a car door, buying new DVD drives, buying new video cards, etc.. etc.. etc.. in an attempt to solve a problem that resulted from a simple disk error, I managed to get the OS installed.
The OS itself is sweeeeeeeeeeeeeeet.
I must say I am impressed with Microsoft's latest work. Especially the home network sharing and setup options. If you have a network consisting of Win7 boxes, setting up a network share to specific home network user groups is as easy as right clicking on a folder.
The interface is very slick with a lot of bells and whistles. I recommend upgrading your graphics card prior to installing Win7 to ensure you have the horsepower necessary to run the pretty interface as well as the latest high end games.
Overall I'm glad I upgraded and finally put down my old xp workhorse for the new shiny model. The user experience is excellent and distinctly different from xp.
Items of note:
Norton antivirus 2009 will not work on Win7 x64. Norton 2010 is required.
Ensure you are able to obtain all x64 bit drivers required prior to installing the OS.
Podcasts will not download for me through iTunes any longer, although the latest iTunes seems to work in all other respects. (solution found, see below)
WoW works fine after a fresh install.
Windows office 2007 works fine after a fresh install.
TrueCrypt will only work in read-only mode.
The latest version of Daemon Tools works, but you will get an error warning you about compatibility issues. You can ignore the error if using the latest version, however the x64 driver is still considered beta.
7 Zip appears to be working correctly.
Google Chrome appears to be working correctly.
Note that to upgrade an existing vista installation with x64 Win7, you'll have to have x64 vista installed. An upgrade will not work on x86 vista. You'll have to perform a custom upgrade which is essentially a clean install that moves your existing windows folder to a windows.old folder.
A few buggy things I had to do in order to get around application problems.
When trying to install Sony Vegas, I kept receiving an error telling me the application did not have rights to access the "AppData\local\temp" directory.
To resolve this issue, I had to open the hidden temp folder and delete all of its contents.
When trying to download podcasts from iTunes, the program required that I set its compatibility mode to run as administrator.
I have just turned off the annoying "User Access Control" functionality, so hopefully that will prevent any further problems such as these in the future.
