My Windows 7 Install Experience

I recently installed Windows 7 Home Premium edition on my primary desktop machine at home.  Since I built the machine fairly recently (November 2008), I was confident that my hardware could handle the OS; also, I had been running 64-bit Vista, which has similar hardware requirements.  I was also curious to get a firsthand look at the Windows 7 given all of the positive buzz (particularly relative to Vista, which had comparatively negative buzz at launch).  Finally, being a PC technology enthusiast, it’s always fun to be running the “latest and greatest.”

My install experience was largely very positive.  I did run into two significant snags, however.

Snag #1 – Windows wouldn’t recognize my wireless card

I run a wireless network at home, and have my PC connected to the network over the wireless (due primarily to the fact there happens to be no phone jack to plug my DSL modem into anywhere near the PC).  The wireless card I’ve always used with this machine, and had no problems with, is a Netgear WG311v3 (an internal PCI-slot network card). 

Unfortunately, after getting Windows 7 installed, Windows wouldn’t recognize the WG311v3 card.  The problem was that Windows 7 64-bit allows the use of only signed drivers, and Netgear has not released a signed driver for this card (despite the fact that this card is still actively sold in stores, as of the time of this writing).  I was surprised by this problem, since apparently the restriction of using signed drivers only has been around in previous versions of Windows as well, and I had been using this card with no problems under Vista 64-bit – I’m still not sure at this point why this card worked for me under Vista 64-bit, but not Windows 7 64-bit. 

After fighting with this problem for 3 hours or so (trying alternative drivers, and other workarounds), I gave up: I temporarily ran a long ethernet cable across my living room to the router to allow me to get online, and I ordered an inexpensive MediaLink MWN-USB54G USB Wireless-G adapter ($30 on Amazon.com at the time of this writing) which had great reviews and was reported by multiple reviewers in their comments to work fine with Windows 7 64-bit.  When the MWN-USB54G arrived a few days later, I plugged it in, and Windows 7 recognized it immediately and I was able to get online wirelessly with no problems – no need to use the enclosed CD.

So, boo to Netgear for not releasing a signed driver for their WG311v3 wireless card, and a bummer that I had to spend a little money on new hardware, but at this point I’m happy and have had no problems with the MWN-USB54G over the past couple of weeks of use.

Snag #2 – Problems initially getting Windows “activated” (registered)

Prior to installing Windows 7, my machine had a single 1.0 TB hard drive; for the purposes of this post, I’ll call this “drive 1.”  I had been running Vista Ultimate edition, for which a direct overinstall-type upgrade to Windows 7 Home Premium is not supported.  A “default” path to getting Window 7 installed in this case might have been to do the following:

• Move my 100+ GB of documents (mostly photos and home videos of the family) to external storage
• Format the hard drive
• Install Windows 7
• Recopy the 100+ GB of documents back onto the drive

However, I didn’t have a convenient way to copy the documents off the drive and then back on.  I decided instead to do the following:

• Remove the hard drive, “drive 1,” from the machine
• Add a new 500 GB hard drive to the machine, “drive 2,” to become the new C: drive
• Install Windows 7
• Add “drive 1” back to the machine – “drive 1” now becomes D:

This procedure successfully got me up and running with Windows 7, with Windows on my C: drive, and all of my documents on my D: drive.

This plan did hit one significant snag: During the initial install, when I was prompted for my CD-key, Windows wouldn’t accept it.  I double-checked the key I’d entered and verified it was correct, but entry of the key still failed with a generic error message.  Being a power user, I figured I could just clear the CD-key field and hit “Continue,” and Windows would let me go through with the install – and this did indeed turn out to be the case – but I might have been stuck if I didn’t know to do that.

Upon getting Windows up and running, I used the built-in “Activate Windows” utility (which I found easily simply by typing “Activate” into the Run/Search field on the Start menu – very cool!) to try and activate Windows using my CD-key once again.  This time I got a better error message instead of the generic one I was getting during initial setup: “The Software Licensing Service determined that this specified product key can only be used for upgrading, not clean installations.”

This made sense – Since I didn’t do an overinstall of Vista, and in fact had completely removed the drive with the Vista install on it from the machine completely while the initial Windows 7 install was running, of course Windows had no way of knowing that I legitimately was eligible for an “upgrade.”  Still, it would have been nice to have gotten a better error message during the initial setup.  Having realized the problem, I would have expected to have been offered some option to insert my old Vista DVD and/or enter my old Vista CD-key in order to prove to Windows 7 that I was, in fact, eligible for the upgrade, but there wasn’t any option like that.

Ultimately, I ended up using a workaround that I found on Paul Thurrott’s article Clean Install Windows 7 with Upgrade Media to successfully activate Windows.  I used “Method #2” from that page, and it worked fine for me!  (Thanks, Paul!)

Tip: Navigate “Back” like in a browser in Microsoft Word

Quick tip: In Microsoft Word, in a document with in-document hyperlinks, after navigating to another location in the document by clicking on a hyperlink (typically by holding Ctrl and clicking the link, as Word will prompt when the mouse cursor is hovered over a link), you can go back to where you were before in the document by using Alt+LeftArrow (hold down the Alt key and press the Left Arrow key) – similar to clicking on the Back button in a web browser.

Alt+RightArrow also works to go forward once again after using the Alt+LeftArrow shortcut to go back.

These are a good shortcuts to be aware of, since Word doesn’t by default show Back/Forward buttons in the toolbar like a browser does.  (This is the case in Word 2003 – I don’t have a copy of Word 2007 in front of me at the moment to check.)

In Word 2003, you can get Word to show Back/Forward buttons in the toolbar by making Word’s Web toolbar visible.  (Right-click a blank area of the toolbar at the top of the Word window, and select Web from the context menu that appears.)

The Alt+LeftArrow and Alt+RightArrow keyboard shortcuts to navigate Back or Forward respectively also work in most web browsers on Windows.

Creating Mirrored Content in MS Word

It is possible to set up sections of “mirrored content” in Microsoft Word, such that the same content appears in two or more places in the document, and changes to the content in the “master” location are automatically mirrored to the other instances of the content.

The following instructions apply to Word 2003; I’ve done this in Word 2007 as well, but the specific procedure will differ slightly due to 2007’s use of the Ribbon interface rather than the traditional menu.

1. Designate the master content

To designate the “master” (primary) version of the content to be mirrored, select the content (e.g. by left-clicking and dragging the mouse cursor over it), and then create a “Bookmark” on the content by selecting Insert | Bookmark from the menu.  In the Bookmark dialog, add a new bookmark and name it whatever you like.

Tip: You may also want to enable “Show Bookmarks” at Tools menu | Options | View tab, so that you can see the bounds of the bookmark you created.

2. Place the mirrored content

Now, go to the place in the document where you want the mirrored copy of the content to appear.  At that location, add a “Cross-Reference” via Insert menu | Reference | Cross-reference.  In the Cross-reference dialog, set Reference Type to “Bookmark” and Insert Reference To to “Bookmark Text”; in the For Which Bookmark field, select the bookmark you created. 

Optionally, you can leave the “Insert as hyperlink” dialog checked.  If this is checked, the mirrored content will still appear normally (it won’t be underlined like a typical World Wide Web hyperlink), but readers of the document will be able to Ctrl+click the mirrored content to jump to the location of the master copy of the content.

Finally, click the dialog’s Insert button, and then the Close button.  The mirrored copy of the content should now appear in the document!

3. Updating the mirrored content

The mirrored content will not immediately automatically update when the master content is updated.  You can update the mirrored copy manually by right-clicking the mirrored text, and selecting “Update Field” from the context menu that appears.

You can update all of the mirrored content in the document at once by selecting the entire document (Edit menu | Select All; or press Ctrl+A), right-clicking anywhere in the document, and selecting “Update Field.”  All mirrored content fields (and any other fields that may be present in the document) will be updated.

Alternatively, you can set Word to automatically update all fields in documents each time the document is printed.  To do this, in Tools menu | Options | Print tab, select the Update Fields check box.

Bonus Tip: Capitalizing the mirrored content

Optionally, you can make the mirrored content appear in ALL CAPS even if the master content is mixed-case.  To do this:

1. Right-click the mirrored content; from the context menu, select Edit Field.
2. In the Field dialog, click the Field Codes button. 
3. In the Field Codes text box that appears, type the following text at the end of the existing content of the text box:
   

   \* UPPER

4. Click OK. The mirrored content should now appear in all uppercase!

(Thanks to Graham Mayor for the tip on the capitalization field switch. See Graham's site for lots of other advanced tips regarding what can be done with Word fields.)

Fix: FTP on Vista: "Replace Existing File with Temp File:I/O Error"

I ran into a problem trying to use Vista's command-line FTP utility (ftp.exe) to download a file directly into the \inetpub\wwwroot directory (the root IIS directory) on my local machine.

The ftp get command produced the following output:

150 Opening ASCII mode data connection for file(4538 bytes).
> Replace Existing File with Temp File:I/O Error
226 Transfer complete.
ftp: 4538 bytes received in 0.17Seconds 26.69Kbytes/sec.

When I checked the local destination directory, the file was not present.

The cause of the problem was that the local directory I was trying to download the file into (in this case, \inetpub\wwwroot) is a protected directory in Vista, requiring administrator access to copy into.

So, there are a couple of possible workarounds:

1. Run ftp.exe as Administrator. (One way to do this is to open Windows Explorer, navigate to the directory where ftp.exe is located -- typically C:\Windows\System32 -- and right-click ftp.exe and select Run As Administrator.)
2. Download the file into a non-protected directory, and then use another tool (such as Windows Explorer) to copy the file to the protected final destination directory.

Tip: How to easily reorder bullet points in MS Word

A quick tip on a discovery I just made: You can quickly reorder bullet points in Microsoft Word putting the caret in the bulleted item to be reordered (i.e. click on the item), and then use Alt+Shift+UpArrow or Alt+Shift+DownArrow to reorder the selected item within the list of bullet points.  Apparently this works in other MS Office programs as well (such as PowerPoint).

I’ve found that this works a lot more nicely than cutting the item to be moved, and then pasting the item in the new location in the list (since often, line breaks need to be fixed up after the new item is pasted in.)

Bonus tip: Alt+Shift+LeftArrow and Alt+Shift+RightArrow will indent/unindent the selected bulleted item.