windows 7 Nightmare

That isn't at all normal. I've found Win7 to be very reliable and have had no problems at all with hardware. In fact, I've installed 7 on some old laptops which required half the drivers to be installed manually on Vista, and 7 picked up and installed pretty much all of the hardware.

Some wireless adapters just don't work properly with 64-bit Windows, though, because their drivers aren't very good. Have you checked that the dongles definitely have 64-bit support?
 
My money is on your memory.

Windows 7 (and Vista before it tbqh) are both as stable in general usage (i.e. programming, DTP etc.) for me as Fedora and Ubuntu, all of which I use on a weekly basis.

If you went from XP to 7 and had something a bit up with your memory, both Vista and 7 have a tendency to really highlight the fact you have a problem as they both make as much use of available RAM as possible where XP was the opposite.

I have been through 4 USB dongles in the past few years on both Vista and 7, all have worked perfectly out of the box (well bar the fact that WiFi in itself is a bit pants :))

The problem is at your end, it simply has to be.
 
I would suggest a re-install. I say this because something very similar was happening to a virtual macine I installed.

Took about 3 hours to install and would get BSOD's, random reboots etc. The event log had over 2900 entries in a matter of days. Drivers would "loose" settings and applications would fail to install complaining about missing system files and .dll's.

I knew it wasn't a hardware issue as the host ESXi was running 3 other virtual machines fine. This prompted me to question the media and sure enough, CRC errors galore! I suggest you burn another copy at 2X speed and let the data integrity/verification take place.

Then do a full format and a fresh install.

For comparison, my main workstation does the Windows 7 install in around 40min. This is to the point where it is ready for me to tinker/install applications.
 
Last edited:
Always do a hash/checksum check after downloading.
Always verify after burning
Windows 7 goes on in around 20mins on a usb most stable yet
 
Hi D.P.

Sorry you're having so much grief but as other have mentioned Windows 7 is a pretty rock solid OS and has been since beta (scarily stable compared to the Vista debacle).

As others have mentioned, I guess its either a hardware issue or your university have managed to hack the installer disk to the point a which it's really not happy.

Anyway, I'd say try from scratch with a new installer disk and minimal hardware installed in the machine and try again. Might be worth memtesting and hard drive testing first, also worth having a quick scoot through your bios settings to make sure there's nothing funny going on there that might cause issues with the install.

But in my experience having installed windows 7 on everything from an old Athlon XP2500 with 512Mb RAM up to my Core i7 920 with 6Gb RAM main desktop, it's always worked flawlessly and in most cases I've not had to install a single driver myself, it just worked.

Good luck!

E-I
 
What does the reliability monitor graph show as the offending software or system device?

Windows 7 is the most stable MS OS to date, it is also the most efficient. Problems come about from faulty hardware (RAM) or incorrectly configured hardware (BIO timings, RAM frequency, AHCI etc).
 
Khaaan! said:
What does the reliability monitor graph show as the offending software or system device?

Windows 7 is the most stable MS OS to date, it is also the most efficient. Problems come about from faulty hardware (RAM) or incorrectly configured hardware (BIO timings, RAM frequency, AHCI etc).
Click to expand...

This.

I use Windows 7 on my work laptop for a solid 9 hours a day, at home on my laptop, on my bro's PC and my parent's machine too. None have a problem.

On the flip side I installed Ubuntu on my laptop and had no end of problems with it. Flash would cause sites to crash randomly and it wasn't properly compatible with my router so DHCP wouldn't work meaning I had to use static IPs.

Rather than make a thread about how useless Linux is, I just realised that it was probably something with my machine that was incompatible. There are millions of Linux users who are fine after all - the same with windows 7 ;)
 
I reinstalled Win7 on my PC at the weekend, took less than a hour and that was mostly me mucking about with firmware updates to my new RAID card. My PC is no where near as fast CPU/GPU wise as the OP's and it should be an evenings work to get everything reinstalled at most.

Flatten the PC and start from scratch, no upgrade/fixing. Just nuke it from orbit.
 
Update:
So I ran a load of HD and memory diagnosis programs (mostly microsoft ones0. no problems found.

I downloaded a new copy of windows from the university and managed to install it.Took a long time for it to complete but the actual installation was fast.

Bots up fine so I tried to get the wireless dongles working and I get the exact same problem. I cannot get them to enable and windows explorer eventually just hangs when trying to enable the Edimax dongle. Enabling the d-link dongle gives a message that it is enabled but form viewing the network adapters it is still shown as not enabled.

Thus I think I will either install winXP for my basic windows need or will properly route some CAT5
 
Go CAT5e :D

I would never consider going to XP over 7 if there was the slightest chance of CAT5e being an option.

Have you tried contacting the manufacturer of either dongle? Have you tried either dongle in another Windows 7 machine. If your Uni gave it out for free, one of your mates should have it installed. If possible, try it on a installation not provided by your Uni. A bit of a faff but it takes 2 minutes to find out.
 
SiriusB said:
Go CAT5e :D

I would never consider going to XP over 7 if there was the slightest chance of CAT5e being an option.

Have you tried contacting the manufacturer of either dongle? Have you tried either dongle in another Windows 7 machine. If your Uni gave it out for free, one of your mates should have it installed. If possible, try it on a installation not provided by your Uni. A bit of a faff but it takes 2 minutes to find out.
Click to expand...

I think it would make sense to try the dongles in another machine, however almost no one I know uses windows, if they do they use XP and/or it is in a virtual machine under linux or setup on bootcamp on a Mac.

I have been on the forums of the dongle manufactures. It really seems i am not a lone. searching on google returns thousands and thousands of hits. The problem is, there is seemingly no pattern to the errors and none of the fixes i've tried have worked.I've about firewalls, virus scanners, disabling under WinXp before installing win7 so using linux to-enable the dongle, re installation of windows, purchasing new dongles. Tried almost all of them now.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom