Ignore the 1394, that is just your Firewire. Look on the back of your PC. Is there a jack that looks like an extra wide phone jack?

Sarahandus, here is a picture of the I/O panel for your motherboard. As Collector says, 1394 is your Firewire port. In this picture the ethernet/LAN/RJ45 port is right above the 2 e-SATA ports.

Sarahandus Motherboard I/O

Syd,
Did you do a clean install or did you do an upgrade of Vista?
The clean install might be faster.

Jenny I bought the upgrade. Just don't have the time nor the energy to reformat my hard drive and start over. I use my home computer for work and right now I have way too much stuff on it to risk a disaster

I'll deal with the slow startup etc. I'm used to it after having Vista for a year now.

Besides, won't I have to buy the full version in order to do a clean install?

Absolutely. An upgrade carry over all the accumulated detritus from your old system; all of the things that can grind a system down to a crawl. You end up with all the same needless garbage in your start up, disk fragmentation, left over registry entries, no longer used system files and drivers, etc. By far, most people's experience with Windows 7 is that it is less of a resource hog and more responsive than Vista.

Another thought, do you have enough RAM?

Hi, Syd!

I just installed Windows 7 this afternoon, and the process is effortless. All you do is start the install and then you can pretty well walk away until it's time to input your product code. I have the upgrade, but I chose "custom" (or clean) install. As long as you already have a valid copy of WinXP or Vista, you don't have to buy the full version.

Personally, I prefer to start off with a clean slate rather than simply upgrade from one operating system to another. That way, if there were any problems, they're gone!

Susan

I'm totally with Susan. When I do my upgrade, I have to do a custom/clean install as I'm upgrading from XP. But if I had a Vista machine, I'd be backing up and doing a clean install there too.

But at least if you have Vista, you have to option to do a clean or upgrade install to suit your needs.

It is common for many users to occasionally do a clean reinstall, even when not upgrading their OS as a kind of maintenance. Starting with a fresh clean install fixes a myriad of problems and makes for faster, leaner machine. The only time that I don't do a clean install is when all I am trying to do is a repair install.

It's good to have confirmation that the upgrade from Vista without the clean install doesn't improve the startup time (for those who aren't sure whether to do a clean install or not).


No. As long as you already have a valid Windows license for your computer, it's both legal and possible to do a clean install. There's an article on doing it at Paul Thurrott's website
http://www.winsupersite.com/win7/clean_install_upgrade_media.asp

So if you ever you have the time, energy, and inclination, the option is there for you.

Oooops! Oh am I embarrassed. In trying to fix the damage done by the Texas Instrument driver I read all the list in the BIOS. Lo and behold the LAN was disabled. Enabling that got the Ethernet working just fine. However the damage done by the TI driver was so extensive I spent the weekend re-installing the OSes again. Also I installed the new Ethernet adapter, it has compatible drivers and I surely don't want to deal with TI again. So far I have XP fully working, but 7 still has drivers and programs to install.

Thank you all so much for all the help and instructions, really learned a lot of new things.

Let us know how you like your new Windows 7 OS!

I'm such a glutton for punishment, I installed the new Linux Ubuntu OS on a partition! Whew, talk about a learning curve!

I think it will take me the rest of my life to get Win7 figured out, that one is really different!

I've found one game that does not like this new OS, Jigsaws Galore ver6. It plays fine, but won't close. Have to shut down to get it closed.

I have thought about trying out Linux, but that's as far as it ever got. We'll bet waiting to know how that goes.

Why not just kill it with the Task Manager?

Indeed. Ctrl/Alt/Delete works the same as always in Windows 7.

Hi Guys
I have just installed Windows 7 clean install from windows xp, no problems with that, but, I have installed 2 games Perry Rhodan and Dracula Origin both installed without any problem, but when I try to run them I get a pop up box stating "insiufficient prevliges: you must be an Administrator to run these applications for the first time", have I got some of my initial setting wrong, the only thing I did was set a password to initially log onto my PC, any help will be gratfully received

Cheers
SAFC

You can try to right click on the executable and choose "Run as administrator", otherwise don't install the games in the Program Files folder.

Collector and Draclvr, Task manager couldn't shut it down either. Very reminiscent of the days when I had to deal with Win ME. Now there was a really bad OS.

Sometimes you can't kill the program, but you usually can kill the process.

Hi Guys
I have just installed Dracula 3 onto my PC having installed Windows 7 and updated all drivers, on running the game, the initial screens are flickering and shortly after I have read the letter in my room, the graphics start to go into what I discrbe as like having double vision as I move my cursor around, anyone else come across this issue, I have searched for a patch, but the only places I have found want me to subscribe etc before download, any help gratefully received
SAFC

safc, I just loaded up Dracula 3 and had exactly the same issue. I don't think there are any official patches for this game, but I might be wrong. The only ones I found were unofficial and I doubt they would have anything to do with this problem.

I checked in the game options, but didn't find anything there that would help. What is your video card? I'm running a GeForce GTX 260. I'm going to try adjusting the framerate.

EDIT: Well, nothing I did helped. I couldn't find the familiar video acceleration in Windows 7, but I tried manually adjusting the screen resolution and turning off PhysX GPU acceleration with no change.

I just got a new computer with Windows 7 64 bit. I wanted to play the first Last Half of Darkness and after install it won't launch because it's missing the D3drm.dll file. I did uninstall and reinstall and restart. I read that this file was not on Vista and assume it's not on Windows 7. Don't know if the solution is to D/L the file and copy into the WoW64 file or if there is something else I should be doing.

I have Beyond the Spirit's Eye, but I don't have the first one, tazmanw.

Thankyou, Draclvr for your response. I installed Beyond the Spirit's Eye just now to see if I encountered the same problem. But it installed perfectly and launched perfectly. So for now perhaps I will forgo replaying the first one and play this one as a warm up to Tomb of the Zojir.
Margie

I have switched to 64bit Windows 7 and find that Jigsaws Galore now works fine. Whether that was because of the 64bit or just a general clean-up is an unknown.

I am playing Outcry at the moment. Have loaded Chronicle of Mystery-The Scorpio Ritual and Barrow Hill with no problems, so far.

And I played Penumbra Overture for a couple of hours last night. Will update my first post...

I might have time to get the 64-bit installed today. I will still have my 32-bit RC on another HDD, so will be able to compare on the two systems.