A week ago my old XP died on me for the last time. And it was the longest installation period i had with XP. Almost two years of heavy duty work and countless installations. Before they never lasted more than a year of torture. Now after almost two years I got a BSOD. Instead of trying to resurrect a dead working horse I decided to install the new Windows 7. Something I was planning for some time.

As a developer you have to be on constant guard as they bombard us with new technology and you have to move on, or you will be left behind. I did not trust Vista, as it was bloated and not as polished as I would like, so for my main development I stayed with the trusty XP. But it is hard to constantly test your work in virtual machines, so now it was time I jumped on the Windows 7 train. And I heard good things about this OS. So I installed Windows 7  in 64 bit flavour. The installation went smoothly, almost on autopilot. When this was done I started installing drivers and applications… and I was pleasantly surprised.

As I expected almost all drivers were found automatically, only the integrated sound card was not recognized (Asus M2N-e SLI AM2 motherboard). What surprised me, after installing my development tools (BDS 2006, RAD 2010) and all the supporting SW, is how responsive the system stayed. There is almost no noticeable slowdown (boot and common usage) when there is a lot of software and drivers installed. It seemed they made quite a few changes from XP on that front. And when I listened to the Mark Russinovich he confirmed that.

http://blogs.technet.com/markrussinovich/archive/2009/10/22/3288577.aspx

They implemented a boot optimizer that learns over multiple boots. Nice. There is a lot of other improvements that Mark talks about. I recommend that you watch the video as Mark is always a wealth of knowledge.

All in all, the new Windows 7 are running smoothly for now and I have a good feeling about the OS. Yes there are still problems but the OS is fresh and the drivers are not yet updated.  I had a lot of troubles to get the audio working. Asus provides no drivers for Windows 7 and the Vista drivers are not working (XP too, but that is expected). So I used my trusty old “Sound Blister Live”. That old sound card is still impressive after 7 or  8 years. It was not easy to get is working under Windows 7, but thanks to “Kx Project” I managed to bring some life to the old card:

http://kxproject.lugosoft.com/

Now it works perfectly. And hats down to the makers of that drivers. I haven’t seen so many options and fine tunings in a driver for quite some time (if ever). Oh and if you are using the Tortoise SVN under 64 bit OS, just install both the 64 and 32 bit version, so you will have support for both types of applications.

Edit:

I saw a lot of search for BDS 2006 and Delphi 7 installation under Windows 7. Dr. Bob has a great article on that. It is for Vista, but it also applies for Windows 7. The only problem is that BDAS 2006 .NET debugger refuses to work under Windows 7. The link is:

http://www.drbob42.com/examines/examin84.htm