Dell Studio 15 powered by Windows 7

Windows 7 is quite the buzz word these days for any blue blooded techy, the upcoming operating system sure has caught on the frenzy of millions of people this time, including MAC owners.

Just a few months back Windows released the Public Release Candidate of this new OS, I have downloaded this RC and have given it a whirr on desktop already.

A stroll through technology community boards show the enthusiasm with which people have wanted to try the Windows 7 RC on to their PC’s, Laptops. The interest in trying to run this new OS is such that a enthusiast has also tried installing 7 on a so called “Dinosaur PC” which has a 266MHz processor and 96MB ram.

Getting back to the Topic, after successfully installing and trying the 1st Public Beta and now the Release Candidate on my Desktop I was curious as to how will this new OS run on my Laptop the Dell Studio 15. Being fairly new ( I have never really used this laptop much) I was a bit skeptic onto trying the Public Beta but now that the RC was released I thought of installing the RC onto my Laptop.

My skepticism made me do up some homework and I tried searching up the net for anybody else who tried installing the RC on the Dell Studio 15, searching although was vain I landed up on a laptop community board where too there was no feedback if anybody had tried installing the RC. So I set up a thread in the Dell specific section of this forum and tried gauging reactions from people who might have tried the RC but only a few responded with one stating he got quite a lot of Blue Screens (BSOD) installing the RC on his Dell Inspiron. Another guy who responded had quite the similar set up with mine including his being a Studio 15 had tried the RC and had successfully got the RC working.

Waiting for a couple of days to see if there were any more responses to this thread, I finally decided to go ahead since apart from these 2 guys no body else responded to the thread.

Installing the RC was fairly easy if you have installed Vista before you will definitely be at home. After creating a partition for the RC, I popped in the RC DVD and started off with the installation. Within some half an hour the RC was pretty much done installing, once the installation was done I was welcomed by the very famous Beta Fish.

The video drivers, audio drivers were all setup by default and were flawlessly working. The screen resolution was pre-configured during the setup itself and the audio too worked right out of the box. The only gripe I noticed after the installation finished was that the laptops touch pad was not working. This was although easily solved by using the Vista Alps touch pad drivers that were available on the driver Cd’s that came with the laptop. Another hardware that did not get installed was the bluetooth module, the same vista drivers solved this issue as well.

I have a WIFI setup at home i.e a ADSL connection is connected to a Netgear Wireless router, since the wireless modules were installed without any issue I was able to connect to the internet within seconds. Speaking of WIFI I even got to use the Windows 7’s homegroup feature that enabled me to access all the specified data on my desktop wirelessly without actually sharing the folder the old school way. Apart from the new visual interface of 7 this homegroup feature really excites me.