This post is the last in my Windows 7 series and it is going to be a now holds barred look at issues we have had with installation and running Windows 7 as an early adopter.

Before I start I have one thing to say; I love Windows 7. I genuinely think that this operating system is the best Microsoft have come up with in a long time. In all my Schools I have always gone for early adoption of anything that Microsoft released; when I did this with Windows Vista at The Long Eaton School it caused quite a few problems and Vista never lived up to the hype.

With Windows 7 we have had less irritation from staff; students have loved it and some of its features just have a wow factor. So on to the issues:

Installation

This was a breeze really, with WDS and MDT 2010 we had no issues with installation at all

Laptops and Hibernation

We only happened across this issue by chance. A member of staff kept complaining that when they moved rooms they lost wireless connection and so could not do their register. There is one thing you have to bear in mind while reading this. We have just installed, as part of a whole site network upgrade, a HP fully managed wireless solution that  gives us FULL school coverage.

After further investigation and running the obligatory IPConfig we found a strange result. The IP address appeared as shown below.

172.16.1.15 (preferred)

No matter what we did it wouldn't ping anything. So renewed the IP address and everything kicked into life.

After some testing we found that when certain laptops hibernated (closing the lid) and came back on they did not reconnect the IP stack. We solved the problem by setting group policy to not hibernate the laptops when the lid closed.

Drivers

Some of our older machines installed Windows 7 with no problems but could not find the drivers for certain bits of hardware. The main culprits are the VGA cards in old Dell’s. Windows 7 recognises the card but does not have any drivers and unfortunately Dell only has drivers for up to Windows XP.

We haven’t resolved this problem as yet

Default Route

On a number of machines we found that Widows 7 decided to create a default route. While this is normal practice, Windows 7 ignored the metrics, so even if we set the actual route with a lower metric Windows tried to use the default route.

The route looks like this in the routing table

0.0.0.0 OnLink

We resolved this issue by adding an entry to the registry for DisableDHCPMediaSense

This is quite a well know issue which first appeared in Vista SP1

Conclusions

I only have one conclusion – Why haven’t you installed Windows 7 already.

It is a major step forward in Microsoft's OS portfolio and for the first time in a long time, I am actually having fun with an OS