Well, I’m glad to see that Windows 7 has the blue screen of death that we are all familiar with. At least some things don’t change, ever.
I was very excited yesterday to get Windows 7 installed on my system. I wiped out one of my partitions and started the install. Everything went well. I was able to get logged in, play around with the interface a bit, change the background, normal start up tasks.
I didn’t even need to install my graphics drivers, and it booted into beautiful 1440×900 resolution. However, as soon as I installed the drivers for my wireless card, everything came to a screeching halt.
The wireless card is sitting in one of my PCI slots, and the graphics card is in a PCI-E slot. When I disable the wireless card, or don’t try to send any traffic across it, the system works just fine. As soon as I connect to an access point and start sending significant amounts of data across it: Blue Screen! I’m guessing that it is an artifact from Vista: http://support.microsoft.com/KB/952681.
If you start blue screening in 7, you might want to check to see what you have in your PCI slots, and if something isn’t necessary disable it (or take it out of the computer). I had an interesting thing happen with the wireless card disabled in the hardware profiles: my video card had really bad performance. Video became very jittery.
I enjoyed the short time I’ve spent with 7, but not being able to access the Internet restricts what I can do with it. I’m thinking I might move my computer closer to my router to connect with a cable, but this can only be a temporary fix. I don’t think the people I live with would like me clutter the house with my computers! There is a bug report in Connect Microsoft for this now.
