I know, I know! I said that I wouldn't bother with Windows 7 Beta but....my son (no, really) decided to give it a try. He had an external harddrive for his Dell laptop and decided to use that to install Windows 7 on. A good idea, but flawed in execution. In a way, we were screwed - in respect of the number of screws used to place the external drive into the laptop as it's boot drive. This was after the built-in CD drive wouldn't mount the downloaded and burned beta software and an external drive wouldn't either. We even tried a bootable USB drive - nope, nothing. More screws later we placed the drive into my Acer laptop and then recreated the bootable CD on the desktop PC. This time it all worked great and we had Windows 7 running in all it's glory. Now my laptop is up in his room and playing Left 4 Dead on-line via the new Microsoft offering. Was it worth it? I have no idea as I haven't even had a chance to play with MY laptop since. This excercise does indicate that it's not that hard to replace things in most laptops - 4 screws for the Dell and 8 for the Acer. The harddrive just plugs into it's socket and away it goes. The only trouble is that some of those screws are so tiny and some are covered up so you don't even know they're even there. Ah well, better than trying to fix things on cars - is it metric, Imperial, US or some weird and wonderful measurement and standard known only to GM.
Comments