Azuki Panda

My Dell Latitude D610 laptop is now 4 years old. Last year after my computer started getting really slow even running Windows XP SP2 I decided I needed to switch to a less resource intensive operating system. My decision on which operating system was mainly limited to Linux distros since Linux is notorious for being able to run on a variety of systems and is also highly customizable. I started with Fedora Core but that did not work too well on my system since I only have 512 MB of RAM and Fedora Core works better for professional level users or servers. My friend Steven tries out operating systems like candy so naturally he went through about 10 different Linux distros just so he could see which one would work on his laptop the best. He tested several low resource ones such as Puppy Linux as well as more mainstream ones such as Ubuntu. He actually found that Xubuntu works the best on his system so I ended up going with that as well. It has been pretty easy to use with the exception of getting the graphics drivers to work at first since I have an ATI card. Ever since Vista came out I’ve kind of lost faith in Windows (not that I really relished the Windows OS in the past) but after all the positive things I’ve heard about Windows 7 I decided I should consider it again. Another reason for me to take another look at running Windows on my laptop is for compatibility - it’s just easier to run Office natively rather than trying to use VirtualBox through Linux.

The first step in installing Windows 7 was to get the ISO, which was readily obtained through BitTorrent. Since a few months ago when Steven tried out the Beta, they have already released the Release Candidate (7100) so that’s what I got. I searched through all my stuff but could not locate a DVD-R or DVD-RW so I had to install it through an external drive. The easist method would be to use a USB drive to convert to a bootable drive, but my USB is only 2 Gb and the Windows ISO is around 2.5 Gb so that was not an option. Luckily I have an external drive (internal IDE drive in an external case) so I partitioned that to create a separate 3.5 Gb partition to place all the Windows 7 installation files. I’ve had some problems with that drive in the past and never quite got around to fixing it, but managed to get it working enough to make the partition and have that partition run fine.

I had to find a few guides about how to make the partition work correctly but this is what worked for me:

1. Click open the Start Menu, right click on “Computer”, “Manage”. Open the “Disk Management” tool.
2. Shrink the partition so that you have space to make another partition at least 3 Gb in size.
3. Right click on the new unallocated volume, “New Simple Volume”, format as “FAT32″. Check “Perform quick format” unless you have time to waste.
4. Right click on the new volume, “Mark Partition as Active”.
5. Mount the Windows 7 ISO using your favorite ISO tool (I use Daemon Tools Lite).
6. Copy the entire DVD directory into your newly created volume.
7. Now take your USB drive and tell the PC to boot from USB. The Windows 7 setup should appear.

[original post] and [another guide]

I actually did this using Paragon Partition Magic and the Windows disk management, but using just the disk management should work fine as well. I had never used an external drive as a bootable drive for installs so it took a few tries before I got all the settings correct.

When I installed Linux a year ago I did not anticipate installing another operating system any time soon, so I just used the entire 80 Gb hard drive as one partition. This is where I ran into a problem since I could not just change the partition as easily as I could in Windows. I managed to find information on GParted and tried to use their instructions to create a LiveUSB since the total size was fairly small. I read many different guides since the one on their site is not very good, but I just could not get the USB to be bootable. Frustrated, I ended up just burning the ISO to a CD and using that to resize the Linux partition to 15 Gb instead of taking up the entire 80 Gb.

After this the Windows 7 install went very smoothly, taking under and hour from the time I started the install.

[Microsoft's Guide on Installing Windows 7]

[Step by Step Installation with Images]