Windows 7 Home Premium *Family Pack* on Boot Camp 3.0
Over the weekend, I purchased the Windows 7 Home Premium 'Family Pack', which runs $150. It is an upgrade edition that allows for the upgrade of 3 separate PCs. Apparently it's in limited supply as I had to hit up four different stores to find it, many of the e-tailers (Amazon, NewEgg, etc) are out of stock.
Anyway, I thought I'd relay that my install was a success. I had been using the Windows 7 Enterprise 90-day trial for IT Professionals and it worked well. Assuming I'd have trouble updating to Home Premium, I formatted the partition during install. I was able to do a clean install by *skipping* the Product ID entry during the installation process.
Once the install was completely finished, I used the Snow Leopard disc to do the Boot Camp driver package. Although I did get a warning that this package was 'known to be problematic', I proceeded with the install anyway and it went just fine. With all systems working properly, I initiated product activation and it worked perfectly - without the need to do two installs (as I've read was necessary with certain Vista upgrade editions).
So, apparently one can indeed use an "upgrade" edition of Windows 7 for a Boot Camp installation, which I know is normally excluded by the Boot Camp documentation.
Liquid and computers don't mix. It might seem simple, but we see an incredible amount of people post here about spills. Keep drinks and other liquids away from your expensive electronics!
Mac Specs: 15" Unibody MBP (2009), White MB (2009), iMac G4
I did an upgrade to Windows 7 64 bit over my old copy of Windows XP. I too was able to do a clean install and everything is working fine. I didn't even get any messages while installing the Boot Camp drivers.
Mac Specs: MacBook 2.4 GHz, 4 Gb, 320 GB 7200 RPM WD Scorpio, OS X 10.6.4, Win 7, 3 iPods
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So, apparently one can indeed use an "upgrade" edition of Windows 7 for a Boot Camp installation, which I know is normally excluded by the Boot Camp documentation.
Brian Livingston's Windows Secrets news letter has a good article about that very subject. Interesting reading: LINK
BTW, the family pack at $150.00 is definitely a bargain. $50 per license is about as inexpensive as it gets. You think MS is learning from Apple?
Brian Livingston's Windows Secrets news letter has a good article about that very subject. Interesting reading: LINK
Apparently the procedure worked for Vista too. I'm glad MS didn't do anything to thwart it. Let's face it, anyone who is intrepid enough to attempt their own Windows upgrade, has probably had older Windows versions in the past.
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BTW, the family pack at $150.00 is definitely a bargain. $50 per license is about as inexpensive as it gets. You think MS is learning from Apple?
Regards.
From what I understand (and this is from the manager of Officemax), the Family Pack was released as a promotional tool and is no longer in production. So although the stores aren't allowed to take the display down (apparently there is a push from the retailers to get Microsoft to produce more), everyone is down to short supply. Amazon had it out there for $150 when it was first launched, now they only have it from their affiliated stores and the price has shot up to $200. So apparently word is getting around that this is in hot demand. Fortunately, Officemax was able to find a cache of copies in another store and had it shipped right to my house (free too!).
All of that to say - if you want to get the 3 pack, better get it soon.
Liquid and computers don't mix. It might seem simple, but we see an incredible amount of people post here about spills. Keep drinks and other liquids away from your expensive electronics!
Liquid and computers don't mix. It might seem simple, but we see an incredible amount of people post here about spills. Keep drinks and other liquids away from your expensive electronics!
Did a clean install of my upgrade in BootCamp. Didn't have XP installed at the time and had to use PT's 'how to' to get it to activate.
So far, three issues. Will not connect to the Time Capsule even though it's indicating 5 bars so am having to use my 'g' network running on the D-Link. Have to find a way to slow the scrolling down some on the trackpad. And says the Bluetooth is disconnected, which is ok since I don't use it anyway.
11GB in size after installing only MSE and Opera.
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I had some issues with the WiFi driver - I'm not sure if that was Boot Camp 2.1, 3.0 or a Microsoft driver (I originally installed 2.1 since I only had my original system discs handy when I did my install).
Shortly after doing my driver installs, I noticed that Microsoft itself had some optional driver updates in Windows Update. I let those install and all seemed well.
Later that night, I got home and installed Boot Camp 3.0 and everything seemed OK, at first. Now, mind you, I had been using the machine mostly at work. When I brought it home, my Internet access in general was incredibly slow and I kept seeing the WiFi card drop off and reconnect.
So, after some experimenting, I ended up doing a driver roll-back in Device Manager, which brought me back to a version dated 1/2008. After that, everything was perfect.
Liquid and computers don't mix. It might seem simple, but we see an incredible amount of people post here about spills. Keep drinks and other liquids away from your expensive electronics!
Not to get off-topic, but I just finished installing Windows 7 on my gaming rig. Big mistake.
I had been dual-booting Vista and XP, but decided that it was time to go with a single OS. This machine is configured as follows (and I know, this isn't all that powerful of a rig these days, but it was fine with XP on it):
Gigabyte N650i SLI motherboard
Intel Core 2 Duo, 2.33GHz
2GB of RAM
Seagate 250GB HDD
EVGA NVIDIA 8800GT/512MB (single - always meant to add a second, but never had the need to).
Prior to installing Windows 7, I had played through Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2 when I was running XP. It ran perfectly well at 1920x1080. Now that I'm on Windows 7, it's choppy - every 15 seconds or so, it stutters.
I'm thinking this is probably memory related, since 7 still has a significantly larger footprint than XP. So, I just ordered another 2GB of RAM. Tomorrow, I'm hoping to get a chance to use BlackViper's service tweaking guide to slim down the running the services (I like to run things very lean, with only the services I actually need - for example, I've already managed to figure out how to turn off the Windows 7 version of what used to be called "System Restore").
Liquid and computers don't mix. It might seem simple, but we see an incredible amount of people post here about spills. Keep drinks and other liquids away from your expensive electronics!
Black Viper still keeping it updated for Win 7 - that's great to know and a great site.
Any of you Windows gamers out there not familiar with his site should become familiar.
Used his guide for several years and kept three logins based on services on my gaming rigs.
Was just looking at COD2 today thinking about giving it a try on my MBP. Haven't played a PC game in about 3 years now. Guess maybe I should see if I can find a demo/trial first.
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I'm wondering whether these performance differences could also be attributed to the 64-bit OS and also DirectX10. Well, if I can't get it sorted out, I made a full Acronis backup and should be able to put things back together again rather quickly. That would be unfortunate though...
Liquid and computers don't mix. It might seem simple, but we see an incredible amount of people post here about spills. Keep drinks and other liquids away from your expensive electronics!
Or grab yourself the new HD 5970. Watched a vid earlier this afternoon where they had it running three 30" monitors. Pretty awesome. If I was still 30 I'd be broke by EOD tomorrow. And I use to think those old text adventure games were just awesome.
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Save a tree. Eat a beaver.
If that thing under the porch ate your dog, it's probably not a cat.
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Or grab yourself the new HD 5970. Watched a vid earlier this afternoon where they had it running three 30" monitors. Pretty awesome. If I was still 30 I'd be broke by EOD tomorrow. And I use to think those old text adventure games were just awesome.
I just don't think it's the video card. That same card did just fine under XP. If it was the card, the only thing I can imagine is that since 7 is DX10 compatible, it's forcing a DX10 mode and the card is just not all that strong in its DX10 support.
Hmmm.... I wonder how that NVIDIA chipset board would do with an ATI video card?
Liquid and computers don't mix. It might seem simple, but we see an incredible amount of people post here about spills. Keep drinks and other liquids away from your expensive electronics!
I'm pretty sure the problem is memory (or lack thereof). I paused the game and opened Task Manager, and it was spiked at 1.8GB in use. Seeing as how Windows just loves to dip into VM at all times, I'm betting all the extra IO and pauses are due to it being really close to the threshold. I'll be interested to see how it does with 4GB instead of 2GB. All of my other favorite games seem to do just fine.
Liquid and computers don't mix. It might seem simple, but we see an incredible amount of people post here about spills. Keep drinks and other liquids away from your expensive electronics!
