windows7_v_web I have a lot of stories to tell about Windows 7 and Fedora 11 because I had many many problems which lead to many adventures for the last two days. First of all, I will start with my first impressions about Windows 7. I used to use Windows Vista Home Premium Edition on my Dell XPS M1330. I wasn’t really happy with Vista, I had several kinds of problems while I was programming with Java. I also wanted to clean up my disk to be able to make my computer a little happy. Since I have Windows 7 Business Edition licensed from the university, I decided to give it a try. I downloaded it and burned it to a DVD and took the first steps.

First I tried to upgrade to Windows 7 to avoid all the hassle of partitioning the drive, but it didn’t let me do it. :) Then I chose to make a clean install which was actually better for me since I needed to get rid of many things that I cannot delete one by one. Well, again it didn’t let me do it :) but this time there was the following error message;

Windows installation encountered an unexpected error. Verify that the installation sources are accessible, and restart the installation. Error code: 0xE0000100

While searching for a solution to my problem on the web, I rewrote the DVD with 1x speed to make sure it is not the source of the problem, which really wasn’t for me. Nobody experienced it or wrote it really clearly, so I couldn’t find a reliable source of information for this. From several forums, I figured that Windows 7 somehow cannot see and write on the partition of Vista. I had the CD for MediaDirect that was given with the computer and I used it to release the Vista partition and when it asked for the OS DVD, I just used the Windows 7 DVD instead of Vista and it worked fine. Here, the problem is the partitions. Probably you can do it with many kinds of Live CDs as a replacement of MediaDirect.

I think the only way to be able to switch to Windows 7 is to back up your work, or whatever is important to you then sacrifice your settings on the previous operating system. It really doesn’t take much time to get everything you need on an OS when you have a list anyway.

My first impressions of Windows 7 is much better than I had for Vista. I didn’t have many compatibility problems and the drivers can easily be obtained from the internet. Everything on the computer is working well and the operating system looks more stable than Vista even if it is new. Well, maybe I am wrong, I haven’t used it for programming yet. However, I don’t think Microsoft will do the same mistakes for Windows 7.
By the way, if for some reason you cannot boot the operating system, try using the tools on the DVD. It takes a while, but they can really repair whatever needs to be repaired.