Tag: hardware

Not done yet, but I have been slowly patching and installing software over the last few evenings, stuck at my desk most days. It’s amazing how little software I have on DVD, and how little I need. Once I got Win 7 installed, I needed to grab the wireless driver from Lenovo, and since then I have been installing from the HDD.

I mentioned on Twitter the other day that I didn’t like Office 2010, and was going to go with 2007 again, but I then realized that I should install SQL 2008 R2 since I’ll demo stuff. Then I realized that I need Office 2010 for Powerpivot.

@##@$%$%$@#@

It’s mostly Outlook, and I should blog about that separately.

In any case, most of the software I need is back on the machine. I did decide to try Chrome (haven’t installed FF at all). However I have my Edit Plus, Password Safe, and Live Mesh working.

Once SQL finishes installing, I should be good to go.

I backed up my machine, copied a bunch of data to both a thumb drive as well as the second hard drive on my W510, and get ready to install Windows 7 x64.

First I had to add memory. I had put 8GB in the bottom slot, but to replace the 4GB with 8GB in the top slots, I had to remove the keyboard. It’s actually easy, unscrew two screws (all the way out), pop out the keyboard, and then replace memory. The underneath slot is hard to reach, but it only took me about 5 minutes to upgrade to 16GB.

Now time for Windows. Nervously I put the x64 image in the DVD drive (replacing it in the 2nd bay) and booting. Windows setup loaded and started and….

Stopped. No DVD driver found. Slightly amusing to me since I had booted from the DVD drive. I tried again, and then went downstairs to search the ‘net. I found a few references but no drivers. The drivers on the Lenovo site were an install, which won’t work during setup. I downloaded Intel drivers, but those didn’t work. To top it off, my laptop was now not booting into the old Windows, saying I needed to run repair. I suspect setup has some boot files there, but now I was really nervous.

I read on a Lenovo forum that someone had a similar issue and fixed it with a new .iso download. So I burned a new Windows x64 DVD from MSDN and tried that. Success!!

Now the install is running and my fingers are crossed. We’ll see how well this works.

I finally got around to adding the new memory (16GB), removing the old 4GB and then replacing the DVD drive with an SSD. Now he hard part: rebuilding the machine.

In order to use the 16GB, and get VMs to run more smoothly, I need 64 bit Windows 7. I had left the x86 install when I received it since I was worried about my Google calendar sync, and at the time I had a few 32 bit programs that didn’t work well with my 64 bit desktop.

Almost a year later things are fairly smooth on the desktop, and since I plan on doing more presenting, and more VM work, I need to take advantage of the RAM. Which means a rebuild.

First step is to back up my machine, which I’m doing now using my Windows Home Server. The next step is to then clone my drive to be safe, and finally I’ll do a reinstall of Windows and begin setting everything back up.