# Windows 7 RC: Installation Issues



## LarryFlowers (Sep 22, 2006)

This thread will be for any issues occuring during the installation of Windows 7 RC.

Larry


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## Steve (Aug 22, 2006)

I put 32-bit Windows 7 on my desktop (Asus socket 775 motherboard, Intel 6600 dual core, 2GB memory) for the first time, which has an NVidia GE Force 7300 SE graphics card. Windows 7 found new drivers for it after installation (8.15.11.8172).

What's happening is during normal use, *the screen will "blink" once or twice, every 3-4 minutes*. It's similar to the way it blinks during installation, when it's trying to calculate the best resolution, or when you change resolution and hit apply.

I went on the NVidia website and actually found a newer driver than the Win 7 update found (8.15.11.8581), but I'm still having the same issue. Couldn't find any "issues" in the NVidia forums similar to this one.

I tried changing refresh rates as well, but no dice. I'm connected to a 19" LCD and had no issues with this video card and the latest drivers under XP SP3.

Any help or ideas would be appreciated! TIA. /steve


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## LarryFlowers (Sep 22, 2006)

Steve... go to the card manufacturers web site and download the latest Vista driver for that card.... then go to the device manager and remove the card. Reboot and when Windows 7 wants to install something say no... then manually run the driver package for Vista and see if that works. If it doesn't let me know. Your screen will look really funky until you get the driver reinstalled.



Steve said:


> I put it on my desktop (Asus socket 775 motherboard, Intel 6600 dual core, 2GB memory) for the first time, which has an NVidia GE Force 7300 SE graphics card. Windows 7 found new drivers for it after installation (8.15.11.8172).
> 
> What's happening is during normal use, the screen will "blink" once or twice, every 3-4 minutes. It's similar to the way it blinks during installation, when it's trying to calculate the best resolution, or when you change resolution and hit apply.
> 
> ...


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## Steve (Aug 22, 2006)

Thanks, Larry!

Man this is tough. Whenever I uninstall the display adapter, when Win 7 comes back after rebooting, it insists on re-installing the NVidia drivers it came bundled with... IOW, I can't say "no".

What I'm going to try now is to manually overwrite that NVidia driver with a standard VGA driver and then try the latest from the NVidia website. They have both Win 7 and Vista drivers, BTW. I assume when you said above to grab the Vista driver, you meant the latest Win 7 driver, right?

If that doesn't work, I'll probably just stick with the standard VGA driver. It doesn't "blink" and gives me the 1280x1024 resolution I need along with 32-bit color, so I'm not sure I need the NVidia stuff anyway. What do you think? /steve


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## LarryFlowers (Sep 22, 2006)

Steve... the latest WIndows 7 driver is a beta and may be the cause of your blinking, that's why I said get the Vista driver... however... go ahead and try the Windows 7 driver... if it cures your problem, great if not use the Vista driver.



Steve said:


> Thanks, Larry!
> 
> Man this is tough. Whenever I uninstall the display adapter, when Win 7 comes back after rebooting, it insists on re-installing the NVidia drivers it came bundled with... IOW, I can't say "no".
> 
> ...


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## LarryFlowers (Sep 22, 2006)

If you forgot this like I did, my Samsung LNT 4665 was connected to the PC using a DVI to HDMI Connection. My normal monitor is a Dell 2309.

Windows 7 decided that the Samsung was a truly fine monitor to make the primary during the installation. The result was, that I didn't know it had made this choice and all I knew was that I was looking at a black screen on the Dell... but the Build number was showing. 

It finally hit me and I switched the Samsung over to the PC's input and completed the install and then switched the primary monitor back to the Dell.

Disconnect your big TV's before you install.

Larry


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## HDJulie (Aug 10, 2008)

Steve said:


> Thanks, Larry!
> 
> Man this is tough. Whenever I uninstall the display adapter, when Win 7 comes back after rebooting, it insists on re-installing the NVidia drivers it came bundled with... IOW, I can't say "no".
> 
> ...


Can you uninstall the driver & then on reboot, go into safe mode? I think if you do that it won't automatically try to install a driver but will let you run a driver install program. I'm not positive, though.


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## Steve (Aug 22, 2006)

LarryFlowers said:


> Steve... the latest WIndows 7 driver is a beta and may be the cause of your blinking, that's why I said get the Vista driver... however... go ahead and try the Windows 7 driver... if it cures your problem, great if not use the Vista driver.


Gotcha. I'll give that a shot. Thx. /steve


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## Steve (Aug 22, 2006)

HDJulie said:


> Can you uninstall the driver & then on reboot, go into safe mode? I think if you do that it won't automatically try to install a driver but will let you run a driver install program. I'm not positive, though.


Good idea, Julie. I'll try that as well if the Vista driver doesn't solve my issue. Thx! /steve


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## houskamp (Sep 14, 2006)

Weird little bug..
Separate partition install, dual boot.
I have all my storage folders on separate partition (same as vista) on second drive.
I also have the folder options set to show all files and show system files..

What I am getting is that Desktop.ini is showing on the desktop.. not just in a folder but right on the desktop..


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## Steve (Aug 22, 2006)

LarryFlowers said:


> Steve... the latest WIndows 7 driver is a beta and may be the cause of your blinking, that's why I said get the Vista driver... however... go ahead and try the Windows 7 driver... if it cures your problem, great if not use the Vista driver.


So neither the NVidia driver that comes with Win 7 or the Win 7 update works. Nor does the latest Win 7 driver from the NVidia website. Just the Vista driver works. Go figure! :lol: /steve

(8.15.11.8171) - NG - Comes with RC1
(8.15.11.8172) - NG - Comes from Windows Update
(8.15.11.8580) - *OK* - NVidia website Vista driver
(8.15.11.8581) - NG - NVidia website Win 7 driver


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## HDJulie (Aug 10, 2008)

I have an GeForce 8800GT & I downloaded the driver from the Nvidia site before I did the install. Windows 7 installed its own driver & then I just ran the Nvidia file after that. My video looks great though I only get 5.9 in the rating.


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## xmguy (Mar 27, 2008)

I'm going to try an install to a 40GB USB 2.0 EXT HDD. All of my internal drives are being used. Is this doable? Will USB 2.0 be fast enough to support an OS?


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## xmguy (Mar 27, 2008)

Got Windows 7 RC1 burned to a DVD. Ran it only to discover Windows 7 can't run on a USB or Firewire EXT HDD. So I had to swap an 2nd internal drive for the ext hdd. I plan to install than way. Just an FYI.


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## Lee L (Aug 15, 2002)

houskamp said:


> Weird little bug..
> Separate partition install, dual boot.
> I have all my storage folders on separate partition (same as vista) on second drive.
> I also have the folder options set to show all files and show system files..
> ...


Well, you told it to show all files didn;t you? 

I noticed the same thing a while back.


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## naijai (Aug 19, 2006)

Downloaded last night burned and installed to my Laptop; Works beautiful but now having issue installing to my desktop keeps saying some files are missing or could be corrupted will try burning the image to another dvd and see if that works any other ides to what could be wrong will help

UPDATE:
Apparently i may have a bad dvd drive on my desktop because it would read any blank dvd's, it will recognise the early dvd's i burned for the windows 7 beta & windows vista beta which were burned on both dvd-r & dvd+r but all the same brand "Memorex so i will try a different burner tonite or different brand of dvd's but if anyone has another opinion please share


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## sideswipe (Dec 4, 2008)

HDJulie said:


> I have an GeForce 8800GT & I downloaded the driver from the Nvidia site before I did the install. Windows 7 installed its own driver & then I just ran the Nvidia file after that. My video looks great though I only get 5.9 in the rating.


Julie thats right on par, my 4830 ATI card only showing 6.1 (cards are similarly ranked by tomshardware) what i still find strange (abeit i know its the sata 1.5 bandwith) is my older 74gb raptor hard drive only gets 5.9


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## Hansen (Jan 1, 2006)

Did a clean install. I had only a couple minor hiccups in installation of RC1 and they were resolved quickly. The first was my NIC in my old (circa Spring 2004) laptop did not have a driver and had an exclamation mark next to it. I plugged it into my router and then it came alive and installed the driver for the NIC and the driver for the wireless card. (With the public beta, I had to go out and find the driver for the wireless card and install, IRRC.) That got me up and running and things went smoothly from there.

I did notice that when installing it saved my beta install of Win 7 to windows.old for access later. That turned out to be good because when looking for a printer driver later, it eventually automatically found the one I had installed for the beta, which took some digging to find back in January. Pretty neat.

I do not see much difference between the public beta (7000) and RC1 (7100), which is good. The speed feels pretty good...about same as the beta, which is good for this old fart of a laptop. The biggest issue for me with this install on this old laptop is my outdated hardware. It runs very nicely and much better than XP but I can't get the full experience of Win 7 with this old hardware. The graphics card is too old and won't support Aero. Interestingly, it also won't let me use the screen savers. I get a message that monitor or card does not support..... In the public beta, it worked fine. I have a recollection of the beta automatically installing an ATI driver that helped out in this regard. But, this time it installed a generic driver. It works fine but would be nice to see if I can get some other things working with it that depend on the monitor. If not, I'm content with it. 

I may install Win 7 on my desktop power system. It's running Vista 64 right now and has two 500gb hard drives. I may take D drive and use that to run as a dual boot system to give it whirl on a more powerful system. Any one have some good instructions on setting up a dual boot system?


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## Steve (Aug 22, 2006)

My NVidia GeForce 7300 GS only gets a 3.8!  /steve


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## smiddy (Apr 5, 2006)

HDJulie said:


> I have an GeForce 8800GT & I downloaded the driver from the Nvidia site before I did the install. Windows 7 installed its own driver & then I just ran the Nvidia file after that. My video looks great though I only get 5.9 in the rating.





sideswipe said:


> Julie thats right on par, my 4830 ATI card only showing 6.1 (cards are similarly ranked by tomshardware) what i still find strange (abeit i know its the sata 1.5 bandwith) is my older 74gb raptor hard drive only gets 5.9


I could be wrong on Win7, but I just installed Vista Ultimate on Monday to an i7-965 with a MSI GTS 250 and OCZ 60 GB SDD on a ASUS Rampage II GENE and the maximum I can get with it is 5.9 on all items. I have read that 5.9 is the highest the performance indicator can muster, for Vista. Perhaps this is also true for Win7?


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## smiddy (Apr 5, 2006)

The Windows Experience Index for Windows 7 ranges from 1.0 to 7.9. Here's an article about it: http://www.osnews.com/story/20807/Windows_Experience_Index_in_Windows_7

-smiddy


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## HDJulie (Aug 10, 2008)

For Vista, the max is 5.9 & I had all 5.9's for my WEI on Vista 64-bit. I loved it . On W7, I get 7.1 for my memory & CPU but the overall score is 5.9 because of the video card. I wonder what it takes to get 7.9 all around.


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## smiddy (Apr 5, 2006)

HDJulie said:


> For Vista, the max is 5.9 & I had all 5.9's for my WEI on Vista 64-bit. I loved it . On W7, I get 7.1 for my memory & CPU but the overall score is 5.9 because of the video card. I wonder what it takes to get 7.9 all around.


If I can get it downloaded and installed quickly enough I'll see what I can muster with the GTS 250...I suspect it should be right in there if not exactly there.


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## dorfd1 (Jul 16, 2008)

Steve said:


> My NVidia GeForce 7300 GS only gets a 3.8!  /steve


I used to have a 7300 gs but I upgraded to the 9400 gt.


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## xmguy (Mar 27, 2008)

My 8600 GT got a 5.9


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## ncxcstud (Apr 22, 2007)

My overall score is 5.4

Processor (AMD64 X2 6000+) - 6.1
Memory (4GB DDR2 ram...can't remember what 'type' at the moment) - 7.1
Graphics - Nvidia Geforce 8800GS - 5.9 (on both)
Primary Hard disk - 5.4


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## ncxcstud (Apr 22, 2007)

Just installed Windows 7 on my wife's laptop and it works like a charm...except that its WEI is 2.9  Which is actually .5 points higher than it is on Vista...score!


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## smiddy (Apr 5, 2006)

I keep getting stuck on 99% downloaded.


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## Hansen (Jan 1, 2006)

ncxcstud said:


> Just installed Windows 7 on my wife's laptop and it works like a charm...except that its WEI is 2.9  Which is actually .5 points higher than it is on Vista...score!


That's okay, my old lap top that my kids use that is running Win 7 gets a 1.0 :lol: But, it still works well for the kids do with it.


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## smiddy (Apr 5, 2006)

Steve said:


> So neither the NVidia driver that comes with Win 7 or the Win 7 update works. Nor does the latest Win 7 driver from the NVidia website. Just the Vista driver works. Go figure! :lol: /steve
> 
> (8.15.11.8171) - NG - Comes with RC1
> (8.15.11.8172) - NG - Comes from Windows Update
> ...


Are you on 64 or 32?


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## Steve (Aug 22, 2006)

smiddy said:


> Are you on 64 or 32?


32-bit

Since then I installed the newer NVidia 8585 Beta for Windows 7 (May 6). Less "blinking" than 8581, but still not as good as the Vista version, so I rolled-it back. /steve


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## smiddy (Apr 5, 2006)

Here is what I received:


Component|What is rated|Subscore|Base score
Processor:|Caclulations per second|7.5|
Memory (RAM):|Memory operations per second|7.7|
Graphics:|Destop performance for Windows Aero|6.1|
Gaming graphics:|3D business and gaming graphics performance|6.1|
Primary hard disk:|Disk data transfer rate|5.9|5.9

These are my specifications:
[table="head']Part Type|Description
CPU|i7-965 @ 3.2 GHz
Motherboard|ASUS Rampage II Gene
RAM|12 GB DDR3 @1333 MHz
GPU|MSI GTS 250 1 GB DDR3
SDD|OCZ 60 GB (Used for Windows 7 only)
HDD|WD 1 TB 7200 RPM
Optical Drive|LG BD/HD-DVD Burner[/table]

I am surprised at the entire thing, since the CPU is the fastest (not over clocked, yet), and the hard drive, which is a very fast Solid State Drive. I have gotten 7.9 on RAM in the a couple of other runs. I am likeing the new system, but I get the impression I could have gotten some better performing items.


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## smiddy (Apr 5, 2006)

Steve said:


> 32-bit
> 
> Since then I installed the newer NVidia 8585 Beta for Windows 7 (May 6). Less "blinking" than 8581, but still not as good as the Vista version, so I rolled-it back. /steve


The reason I ask is I'm considering going to the Vista version for 64 bit due to the issues Larry and I are having with DirecTV2PC.


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## Steve (Aug 22, 2006)

smiddy said:


> [...] I am likeing the new system, but I get the impression I could have gotten some better performing items.


Maybe, but that's one sweet system you put together there. I wonder if the Cray-1 had as many megaflops of CPU available as you have now! :lol: It only cost $5-$8 million back in 1975, when a new car cost about $4k and a new home around $40k. /steve


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## Hansen (Jan 1, 2006)

smiddy said:


> Here is what I received:
> 
> 
> Component|What is rated|Subscore|Base score
> ...


Okay Smiddy, that is one kick ass system. Nice work.


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## LarryFlowers (Sep 22, 2006)

Smiddy... I think I may have a way around the DirecTV2PC problem and I will be working on it this weekend. If you can wait a little while, I may have the problem resolved by Monday.

Larry



smiddy said:


> The reason I ask is I'm considering going to the Vista version for 64 bit due to the issues Larry and I are having with DirecTV2PC.


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## smiddy (Apr 5, 2006)

Steve said:


> Maybe, but that's one sweet system you put together there. I wonder if the Cray-1 had as many megaflops of CPU available as you have now! :lol: It only cost $5-$8 million back in 1975, when a new car cost about $4k and a new home around $40k. /steve


Man, I'd love to have a Cray (are they still Cray, I think they have changed names). I put this together with parts and shipping for just over $2,800. Thanks by the way...I also got the wireless Logitech keyboard and mouse.



Hansen said:


> Okay Smiddy, that is one kick ass system. Nice work.


Thanks, it is a far cry from the AMD 3000+ I had been using. I get no hesitations what so ever. Even during large download or huge installs. It is essentially 8 CPUs too:











LarryFlowers said:


> Smiddy... I think I may have a way around the DirecTV2PC problem and I will be working on it this weekend. If you can wait a little while, I may have the problem resolved by Monday.
> 
> Larry


I am looking forward to hearing how it turns out. I still beleive they should work together to solve this however, as a clean driver to/from DirecTV2PC thing.


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## thumperr (Feb 10, 2006)

smiddy said:


> Man, I'd love to have a Cray (are they still Cray, I think they have changed names). I put this together with parts and shipping for just over $2,800. Thanks by the way...I also got the wireless Logitech keyboard and mouse.


Cray is still a public company, building super computers.
http://quotes.nasdaq.com/asp/SummaryQuote.asp?symbol=CRAY&selected=CRAY


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