Worst Blog Ever

At CES (Consumer’s Electronic Show), this year Microsoft had announced that it would be making the beta version of Windows 7 available for download to the first 2.5 million people.  Being a Microsoft Fanboy, I visited the site early on to become one of the few who get to download it.  Unfortunately, Microsoft didn’t expect the volume of people trying to download Windows 7, and it brought their server down.  A day later it was up and running, and had my copy downloaded onto my computer.

The download comes as an ISO file, which you have to burn to a DVD using an ISO burning program, which I didn’t have.  So I downloaded a freeware version, read up on how to burn an ISO file, and burned a copy to DVD.  I then did a backup of all my files, as it is always prudent to guard your data, and then started the process of partitioning my hard drive in order to use Windows 7 as a dual boot.  That is where I started running into problems.

I have a Dell Inspiron 1420 laptop.  Virtually all Dell computers come with a hard drive that is partitioned into a couple of different drives: The main partition, a recovery partition (a lifesaver), one for utilities, and another one which is unknown to me.  Unbeknownst to me, Vista has a limit of four partitions per disk, so when I allocated the space on the main partition for Windows 7, I would get an error message every time I tried to create the new partition.  Only after reading in the forums, did I learn about this limitation.  So I had to reallocate the space back to my primary partition.

Ok, I thought, I will just do a new install of Windows 7, and then revert back to Vista after the beta expires.  But then I remembered that I had heard a podcast on Windows Weekly, that Skype does not work properly using the beat of Windows 7.  Normally, I wouldn’t think that it would be a big deal, but Kristie has been utilizing my machine to conduct interviews for her PHD program.  So much for that idea.

Then another thought popped into my head; I have a WD external hard drive, and I could adjust the system BIOS to boot from a USB device.  So, I repeated the steps in partitioning the external hard drive, as I did for the main drive.  At this point, my system had a serious problem when restarting, and it all fell apart from there.  I had to restore my computer back to its factory settings (ok, I didn’t have to, but I thought it would be prudent).  After hours of reinstalling programs, updates, security, restoring data files (see, backups are a good idea), I finally was ready to install Windows 7 on my external hard drive.

Fail.

When trying to do the install, Windows 7 advised me that it can not be installed onto an external hard drive (Sigh).  So after about a full day, not counting the previous day’s server problems, I basically just cleaned up my system.  But as soon as Kristie is finished with her interviews, I’m at it again!