Window 7 Upgrade - No significant problems

At the end of last week, I decided to take a chance and upgrade my primary desktop system from Vista (which, once you disable UAC, is perfectly fine, by the way) to Windows 7. I previously had 7 installed on one of my vintage laptops, but the machine was really not up to the job.

My desktop system is a venerable old HP xw4000, which, when it was new, was a high-end engineering workstation. It has a pair of 2.8 GHz Intel Xeon processors, built-in SCSI drive interface and 3 GB of RAMBUS memory. It is, in fact, very similar to our primary workhorse Dell server. It is, however, an old system, so the upgrade to Windows 7 was not a risk-free decision. Nevertheless, it has been running Vista fine for years, so I felt that, after a full backup, an in-place upgrade was worth a shot.

I started by running Microsoft's Windows 7 compatibility checker, which I found somewhere on the web, but cannot locate now. I already had the disk, so it really wasn't necessary because the same tool is on there as well. That test passed, but once I actually started the install, it goes through a more fine-grained analysis and turned up additional hardware and software issues.

This part of the process qualifies it as a "techstration." I had to restart the installation process several times and each time it came up with additional hardware or software issues that I had to address. The first hardware thing was, I thought, a show-stopper, having to do with the on-board SCSI adapter. I could not locate a Windows 7 driver (the driver will probably show up on the web at some point in the future), but I did find a workaround for the Adaptec SCSI card that I also have in the computer. I disabled the on-board SCSI and plugged my primary drive into the Adaptec card instead. Previously that card was used just for the tape backup drive. The card can handle up to 14 devices, so having one device on each channel was not an issue at all. I don't really recall why I had even installed it to begin with. It was probably something silly like a cable issue that prevented me from using the on-board SCSI for both the disk and tape drive. Anyway, using the Adaptec card for both worked fine.

The Win7 installation also issued a warning about my on-board Realtek audio, but I just ignored that, figuring that worst case I could plug in an audio card. I also had to uninstall WindowBlinds and Microsoft's OneCare. The latter has been discontinued and replaced by Microsoft's free Security Essentials malware software. (Save that link! It's another one that is WAY too hard to find.)

The last time I restarted the installation, it told me I should uninstall Microsoft SQL Server 2008! This I could not understand, and I was fed up with restarting the installer and waiting through the test repeatedly, so I just ignored that as well. I don't really use my local copy of SQL Server for anything, so I am not sure whether it still works or not.

At long last, the actual installation started. I checked on it from time to time during the next five hours or so, but it was still not finished, so I just turned off the monitors and went to bed. The following morning, it appeared to have completed successfully and was patiently awaiting my log-in.

Over the past few days I have run into a couple of little things, but nothing bad. For example, whenever I clicked the shortcut to start Tigerpaw, the CRM software that we use, it mysteriously started the program's installer. This has happened before with this software, but I resolved it relatively painlessly by uninstalling and reinstalling TIgerpaw. The database is on the server and all my preferences were preserved, so it was no big deal.

There were a couple of other little things that were too unremarkable to remember. So, bottom line --- so far, so good.

Zywall SSL 10 - Browser Workaround

An increasingly annoying issue with the Zyxel Zywall SSL 10 vpn appliance is that you have to download the client software from the appliance when you connect, and the officially supported browser list does not include IE8. Actually, I don't think it includes IE7 either, but Zyxel tech support told me that IE7 does work, and subsequent testing confirmed that to be true. Once 8 is installed on an XP or Vista system, you can restore 7 by uninstalling IE8. OK, not happy about it, but that is workable -- until you go to Windows 7, where the default browser is IE8.

Once the Zywall Secu-extender virtual VPN adapter is installed, you can start the VPN using the system tray icon. Our remote programmer somehow damaged his pre-Windows7 installation of the Secu-extender, so we were now faced with re-installing it. Tried IE8 and Firefox, but neither gets past the "Loading..." graphic. On a hunch, we tried Chrome (v. 3.0.195.24) and it worked perfectly! For now, that appears to be the workaround. I see nothing on the Zyxel site that suggests that they will be updating the firmware in the Zywall SSL 10 to support the newer versions of IE or Firefox, so let's hope that Google keeps Chrome from getting too fancy.

To be specific, the fix in this case required uninstalling the broken Zywall Secu-extender from Control Panel, then launching Chrome and connecting to our https URL to trigger a fresh download and install.