Moving to Windows 7 — Part One

The mother­board on my old Win­dows XP box quit while I was tak­ing a break for lunch one day, and I decided to replace it with an updated Win­dows box. So I’ll keep on using a Snow Leo­pard laptop, OpenSol­ar­is serv­er, and Win­dows 7 as well. 

Maybe I was ask­ing for trouble, going with the 64-bit ver­sion of Win­dows 7 Pro­fes­sion­al, but with a quad core Intel box it seemed a shame to not do so. Most of the tools I use every day (like Fire­fox and Pidgin) are easy to rein­stall and thus ignor­able. But there are some that cost me a little more time to fig­ure out. Admit­tedly, it’s a some­what eclect­ic collection.

First off, mail. I use Pegas­us Mail, have for many years, and it suits the way I work. Every time I’ve upgraded, it’s worked flaw­lessly. This time, it took a while before I figured out that I needed to not take the defaults in the install, but rather uncheck the “cre­ate user con­fig­ur­a­tion” box, and then in the fol­low­ing con­fig­ur­a­tion step select “single user only”. After that, copy­ing across the mail and con­fig­ur­a­tion file worked per­fectly to set it up right.

The Palm desktop presents more of an issue. It turns out that you can­’t use a USB con­nec­tion to syn­chron­ize under the 64-bit ver­sion of Win­dows 7, so I’ll have to get a bluetooth adapter to syn­chron­ize my Treo 680. Or get a new phone. I’m still mulling the options on that one.

Print­er: the HP Col­or Laser­jet CP1510 drivers and soft­ware won’t install from the CD. This isn’t really an issue; the default Win­dows 7 driver works fine but does­n’t show you the toner status etc. For­tu­nately, the HP.com web­site has an updated “advanced” driver. Except for, it does­n’t do all the status stuff either, appar­ently. Oh well.

The scan­ner is an ancient one from Can­on, the 3000F. The scan­ning applic­a­tion won’t install. There are no drivers or updated applic­a­tions on the Can­on web site for Win­dows 7. The tool­box applic­a­tion for scan­ning and copy­ing shows up on c|net, at http://download.cnet.com/CanoScan-Toolbox/3000–2094_4-10972136.html (it may be a dead link by the time you read this), but without the drivers it isn’t much use. Hunt­ing around on the web showed that this is a case for the Vir­tu­al XP mode. This con­sists of 2 down­loads, the first of which is 500 MB. The cur­rent estim­ate on our cur­rently floaky DSL link is almost 2 hours to go, so I think I’ll go and do some real work while wait­ing for it to trickle in, and con­tin­ue this post when I’ve made some more progress.