After updating a working Vista system to Windows 7 several things happened that made what seemed like an easy transition to Windows 7 from Vista less than productive. I detail these issues to help you avoid the same issues. Yes, Windows 7 is worth the pain. It’s noticeably faster at every step, the UI is different but I get it. It’s more secure, but that’s a PIA sometimes—and that’s not a Primary Interop Assembly.
- I discovered that it didn’t take 8 minutes to boot my laptop or 3 minutes to shut it down. Now my system boots in about 2 minutes (or so) and shuts down when I tell it to. That alone would be worth the price of admission.
- I also discovered that for some reason Win7 setup seems to think that SQL Server (with SP1) is somehow evil and not compatible. It’s not. Sigh. Setup also crashed the first time but Win7 (apparently) inserted a shim and got it to setup.
- I discovered that my trusted Acronis Workstation Echo backup software is not only evil in Win7’s eyes, it’s not permitted to run at all. This means I could not go back. No, Acronis never got back to me on why after 3 days and a weekend. 2 strikes.
- I also discovered that RS would come up but I couldn’t get to it—either no error was returned (how nice) or I would get a 505. After some help from Peter and some fiddling we did get it to work (sort of) with ports 81 and 444 (http/https). It seems that some application had locked down these ports.The event log was full of errors complaining that port 80 was blocked—so was 443 according to NetStat –na.
- I also discovered that the Report Web site and Report Manager would not work unless I ran the browser As Admin. Ah, the joys of having security shackle us down while we work.
- I found my scripts that ran Net Start commands would not work either unless they too were run As Admin—even with the CAS turned all the way down. Apparently, the trick is to run most of our dev tools As Admin.
- I discovered that if you setup an elevated security manifest in Visual Studio you get switched to As Admin mode.
- I found the Lenovo System Update program is incompatible but seems to work—but not all of the applications/configuration changes work. I expect these will come online in October after the general availability date. Without these extra drivers and utilities, the fingerprint reader, display and other stuff does not work.
Given the number of errors in the event log and the XP/Vista leftover detritus on my system I took Peter’s advice and flattened the system and started over. Well into the first attempt to rebuild the system I discovered that IIS was blocked again. I started over and re-checked IIS after each program was installed, but this time I installed IIS first—before the other utilities. That cured the problem. Apparently Skype grabbed the ports and since no one was using them, it would not let go when another application came along for a binding. The solution was simple enough (now you tell me). Tell Skype to keeps its bony binary fingers off 80 and 443—it’s a tools option.
