Windows 7 - A Premium Experience?

The following describes my experiences in installing Windows 7 Home Premium as a clean install on a new machine. I've never had such a bad experience in trying to install a version of Windows (desktop or server) in my 20+ years of working in IT. 24 hours after starting, I finally thought I'd cracked it but I'm now writing this before starting again for the umpteenth time. And I - supposedly - know what I'm doing.

Mrs Vinman's PC has been playing up for a while and it's fairly old now, so I decided to build her a replacement for her birthday. There seemed little point in buying Vista so I pre-ordered a copy of Windows 7 Home Premium. I sat down yesterday afternoon with a nice cup of tea and decided to spend an hour or so installing it. That was at 2pm. Shortly after 2am this morning I went to bed, thinking that I'd finally cracked it and could start transferring her data. Hah! After it trashed itself this morning I'm just about to start again.

Click the Read More link below to see the full details of the issues I experienced. I'll post separately if and when it installs reliably. For now, I'd say wait before you try as not all manufacturers seem to have made drivers available. I think several of the problems I'm having relate to chipset and SATA drivers for my Gigabyte motherboard. The Gigabyte website has W7 64-bit drivers for the sound chip, SATA RAID (their own controller, not the Intel) and the LAN chip but not the chipset. A DriverAgent scan advised that the USB and SATA drivers were out of date but the links to download updated ones were incorrect.
I'd installed the Release Candidate version on an old laptop with no major problems so I really wasn't expecting it to take long on a clean and modern machine. It's hardly bleeding edge, but powerful enough for Mrs Vinman's purposes, with new dual core 3.0GHz CPU, 4GB DDR2 RAM, Hitachi 500GB SATA drive, LG BD-ROM and a spare Nvidia GTS 8800 graphics card. I decided to install the 64-bit version as 64-bit Vista has been very stable on my PC.

The DVD booted and the initial setup screens progressed to the point where I had to create an install partition on the disk. I created a 200GB partition for the system and clicked Next. Up popped an error telling me that "Setup could not continue as files could not be copied" which meant we had to start again. On starting again and getting to the same point (except that my 200GB partition was already there), this time it decided to create a 100MB separate partition for system files; setup then continued to the next section where the installation files are expanded. And then it failed with error 0x80070570. I searched the forums and found numerous posts describing this as an error with the 64-bit RC1 installation. Most were pointing to the ISO image having been burnt to disc at too high a speed. Since this was the branded product DVD, this didn't fill me with confidence!

A blow-by-blow account of every issue would take all day but suffice to say I saw more of the Blue Screen of Death (BSOD) in the next few hours than I've ever seen in a single install process. The first few attempts were either one or other of the above two issues, until I decided to soft-reset the PC after creating the partitions. On the next attempt it told me that a "previous Windows installation had been detected but would be renamed to Windows.old" and it then proceeded with setup. Hooray, I thought, I've cracked it. Thirty minutes later we got to the last part of setup and the first reboot. On rebooting and WIndows starting, it blue screened, complaining about tcpip.sys.

I hadn't been connected to the network at this point because I never like to make a Windows machine visible to the web without an AV client in place first. I bit the bullet and connected the LAN cable to my router and started again. After going through the same problems during the partition creation, I again got to the stage where setup was about to reboot for the first time. This time it blue screened complaining about ntfs.sys. Aaaarrgggghhh!

After going through all these again, at about 7pm last night I finally got it fully installed and logged on for the first time. First things first I thought, let's install Norton Internet Security 2010 which is apparently compatible with Windows 7 64-bit. The installation proceeded well (despite installing itself as a 32-bit app) and it stated that it was nearing completion...100%...starting services...10 seconds remaining... and there it stayed, with '10 seconds remaining' for a few minutes before it reported that an error had occurred. I rebooted and waited for the inevitable BSOD... which didn't appear. It started up without any errors and the Norton icon was in the system tray. I did a Live Update and all seemed to be working so the next step was to do a Windows Update. 7 Important and 2 Optional updates were found so I chose the important ones for the initial update. These started to download and... BSOD (USB)! The only USB devices connected were the mouse and keyboard.

Various combinations of individual update attempts failed, either with a BSOD on download or failure to install once downloaded. Helpfully (sic), screens appear to provide information on why updates might fail. After following various instructions to clean out the update store and run checkdisks etc. all attempts still failed. Then I was presented with a link to a utility for checking that all of the components of Windows Update are registered correctly (can't remember what it was called but I was pretty frustrated at the time); following the link took me to a TechNet page to download the utility. For Windows 7 RC1, not the production version. I downloaded it anyway but naturally it wouldn't run.

Then I received a warning that my AV client was switched off and it refused all attempts to restart it. I stopped to have something to eat for an hour or so and came back to find it had locked up completely with the screen blank. After a power cycle it came back up and I decided to run a DriverAgent scan from the motherboard manufacturer's website to make sure the chipset drivers were up to date. The scan indicated the the SATA, USB, sound and graphics card drivers were all out of date. As I was installing to a SATA hard drive, I guessed this might have something to do with the issues however there were no W7 drivers available on the Gigabyte website for the chipset: just for sound, network and the Gigabyte SATA RAID ports (not the Intel ones I was using for the hard drive and BD-ROM). Great. So I decided to try the Vista 64-bit drivers from the mobo CD - things couldn't get any worse, right? These installed successfully and prompted for a reboot, which I did and... BSOD! On restart, W7 did actually automatically opt for returning to the previous restore point and managed to boot up but in this case being back in the proverbial frying pan didn't make me feel much better.

At 11pm last night I decided to have one last go. This time, with the experience I'd already picked up, things went relatively smoothly until the final stage, where it prompts for a username/computername and password. I entered a password the first time and clicked Next. BSOD! This time complaining about cdrom.sys. On reboot it picked up with the final stage of setup and again prompted for user/computer names. This time, when I entered the same name, it told me that the account already existed so I used another name and clicked Next. Yep, BSOD on cdrom.sys again! Again on reboot, it did the same and advised that both of the previously used names were in use. This time I needed some inspiration so glanced around the room for a name, spotted one of Richard Dawkins' books and entered 'God' as the username. It worked! For the first something religious has been useful ;-). Thanks Richard!

I logged on and went straight to the Gigabyte website and installed the SATA and LAN drivers. Then Norton's installed without an issue and Windows Update successfully downloaded and installed the Important patches without a hitch! Everything seemed to be working so at 2am I went to bed, tired but buoyed by my success.

This morning I booted up the W7 machine. All still seemed hunky dory so I decided to update the graphics card driver. This was available as an optional update through Windows Update but, as a 120MB download, I couldn't be bothered to do it last night. Probably wise, as it downloaded but refused to install, due to an 'unknown error'. Oh well, I went to the nvidia website and downloaded it from there. This should work, I thought (oh, such naivety), it's WHQL certified for W7 64-bit. Well, it downloaded successfully but refused to install, displaying a message that it was corrupt. I've had a quick search of the forums and apparently these errors mean that the currently installed driver is the latest. Of course it would be far too easy to just tell you that.

I wasn't particularly bothered as the display was bright and sharp anyway, it's just nice to have the latest ones installed. So all was well, no more blue screens or errors and it seemed ready to start loading some apps and data. There was just one issue, which was at the logon screen it showed all three admin accounts that had been created. Everything I'd done had been under the God account but the other two were still there. No point having too many admin accounts, let's get rid of those others. BAD MOVE! On trying to remove the first one, the machine BSOD'd with a cdrom.sys error again. On reboot it went straight into a disk check and spent ten minutes removing orphaned files. To coin a phrase: "I've got a real bad feeling about this!" and sure enough it will now not boot at all.

Now I've got this off my chest, I shall start again.