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2 years ago
Can you install Windows 7 Professional on a Dell Vostro 1700 laptop?
Yes you can. I’ve been wanting to reinstall my operating system for a while. At the same time I wanted to add a new hard drive as my system drive and use my current system drive to be a data drive. This would give me an 80GB system drive and a 160GB data drive. I like this setup. I don’t need as much space on my system drive and it just seems cleaner to me.
I didn’t purchase my 2nd drive from Dell so I had to order the mounting bracket after the fact. The first thing I discovered is that the mounting bracket didn’t fit, but after some minor modification I was able to secure the mounting bracket and was ready to go.
I put the Windows 7 installation DVD in and booted up. The new drives were recognized and the install process started. I had no problems with the installation at all. I provided the basic information, the install completed and I booted into Windows 7 for the first time.
My first reaction was that I didn’t like it, but after a little customization I began to feel more at home. I joined the laptop to our domain and logged on. All the network printer drivers installed just fine. Windows Updates worked, some third party drivers were recognized and were installed automatically.
Problem #1 was that my external monitor didn’t work. The solution was to download and install the Vista nVidia Display Drivers. Monitor responded right away.
Problem #2 was figuring out the last two items in Device Manager labeled as Base System Device. These turned out to be the Ricoh Memory Stick Controller and Ricoh SD/MMC Host Controller.
I went ahead and installed the SigmaTel Audio drivers, but I don’t think I really had to.
Problem #3 was that my old Windows XP NTFS system drive was not recognized. At the command prompt I typed in “takeown /f d:” and waited for a success message. Then I typed in “icacls d: /grant jvoss:F”
All of these issues are typical of any operating system install and not just Windows 7. So in my opinion to get to this point was relatively simple.
I installed Microsoft Office software, setup Outlook to use our Exchange server, installed database drivers and tested ODBC queries to our company ERP software and finally installed the ERP software client and tested that.
At this point I brought the laptop home, connected to my home wireless by supplying the security key, and downloaded our company VPN software from the firewall so I can use my laptop from home. At first execution the VPN software didn’t connect so I set it to run as Administrator and had no problems at all.
By the way I love the new Paint software that comes with Windows 7! With it I can easily take a screen shot, crop it and save it in several different formats without having to have any additional image software installed.
Using the new Disk Management software I was able to clean up some of the unallocated and improperly partitioned space on my d: drive and extend the main partition to the full amount of drive space within seconds. I’ll begin organizing the new data drive later.
Now I will begin to install Visual Studio 2008, SQL Server Management Studio 2008 and some legacy applications, but I don’t expect any problems at this point.
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