Sebastian Grant

So I finally got round to installing Windows 7 after some fun and games with Partition Magic and here are my findings.

1. After selecting “What to know before installing Windows” you get a pretty standard installation guide: what to do if you’re upgrading, what to do if you’re installing a clean copy etc etc. The only thing that is non-standard about this installation guide – and I don’t think I’ve ever seen this in a product before (even a beta) – is that the installation guide is refering to a previous version! Not just any previous version, but the version that so many people hated they’ve gone back to that version’s predecessor and the company who released that software to retract it’s own plans to stop supporting said predecessor!
2. After selecting your installation drive etc, a familiar vista-like installation box appears with “progress indicators” but more importantly a line saying “Your computer will restart several times during installation”. Why? Why restart it, do a bit more, restart it, do a bit more? Oh yes, of course, tradition!
3. After a good twenty minutes of “Copying files” the installation got to about 30% of “Expanding files” and suddenly told me that the installation files were unavailable or corrupted! Well excuse me chap, but I downloaded the ISO directly from YOU, not via a torrent or some unscrupulous digital terrorist, but from YOU (after all you’re not unscrupulous digital terrorists, you’re simply regulated digital terrorists) and burnt it directly to a brand-shiny new DVD-Rom disc and verified the contents before setting off on this merry charade!
4. On the second attempt I hit 62% before receiving the same error.
5. And the third…

OK, maybe my media somehow didn’t burn properly, and the burn verification was incorrect so I’ll go and burn another copy, then get back to you tomorrow…

Today I had a few tasks to complete:

1). Get one of my spare boxes set up as a web server. Check all the hardware is still functional, install a very bare Linux setup, then configure Apache and Tomcat with a bunch of VHosts.

Well I started to do this but quickly discovered that my spare box only has a wired ethernet card and couldn’t be bothered to compile the USB WiFi drivers – a job for another day. Or a better idea would be to hook up another powerline adaptor somewhere I can discretely stash away a 24/7 live server.

2). Get a virtual machine setup on the old PC to install Windows 7. This first means backing up a load of stuff to DVD just to make space on the hard disk!

I changed my plan on this one… instead of VMing it (which would have obscured the real “performance” of Windows 7) I decided to re-partition the drive and dual boot. Now, I’ve always been wary of partitioning a live system and rightly so it seems.

I feel it has been long enough now, I can talk about this without feeling too much pain. I would like to explain to you the reason that I shall not be installing BootCamp on my shiny iMac; I’m sure, after reading, you will be sympathetic.

It was a hot, sunny… no it wasn’t, it was mid-January so pretty cold in fact, well it was afternoon at least, I had just completed some work for enotions and I decided that it was high time that I should fill in my time tracker so that I would know what to invoice at the end of the month; when it suddenly dawned on me that the software would only run on a PC! Shock horror! I’d have to fire up that noisy, unstable, expensive paperweight every time I wanted to print an invoice!

I knew how to get around this though, so I fired up Parallels (only a demo version as I was not yet convinced) and installed ClearlyBookkeeping; install went fine, no major errors or hiccups, so I cranked the handle on the PC and exported all my data from the BeetleJoose accounts (clever Skelli!). However! When it came to actually running CB through Parallels, it just wouldn’t open! I thought: “Oh well, I’ll just have to install BootCamp instead”. BIG MISTAKE!