Lukas Beeler's IT Blog

Since the 30th of April, Windows 7 RC is available. I’ve been using Windows 7 for quite some time, but that usually doesn’t tell us much about end user experience with Windows 7.

At work, we’ve decided to move several people with a strong technical background over to Windows 7 x64 (if they want, of course). In order to drive internal testing, usage data and generally bring awareness to the whole personnel at the company and also our customers.

By now, i’ve migrated 8 laptops to Windows 7 RC – with which people are working in production and using for their everyday work. Of course in case we run in real troubles with Windows 7, we still have a few spare laptops that run Windows Vista SP2 x32.

The migration has been without any major issues moving from Windows Vista to Windows 7 than when moving from XP to Windows 7, most of this can probably be attributed to the fact that all the applications we use internally are compatible with Windows Vista and we also got a lot of experience with the new deployment model and tools available since Windows Vista.

Still, we ran into a few smaller problems that are mostly un-resolved as of yet, but do not majorly impact anything.

We use Lenovo T60, R61, T61, T500, W500 and R500 laptops. All of these have been running Windows Vista SP1 x32 with BitLocker enabled in TPM+PIN Mode. We installed Windows 7 using Clean (Custom), without formatting the hard drive first – this required us to suspend Bitlocker protection in Windows Vista before running setup. Two devices were reformatted – at the wish of the person using them.

I also upgraded all laptops to 4GB of RAM – which now can actually be used. For example, my W500 with Vista x32 only saw 2.25GB of the 4GB RAM (not a typo – only 2GB).

My biggest issue was that Bitlocker on Windows 7 didn’t properly backup it’s Bitlocker Key and TPM to Active Directory. This is a major issue, as i now had to manually backup the Bitlocker Keys to a secure network share. I didn’t find much about this on the Web, i suspect that not many people used this functionality, and there’s almost no documentation available about Windows 7 Bitlocker. As the workaround of saving the key works just as well, i can live with this.

The fingerprint reader installed on all those Thinkpads has a driver available, but the different drivers have different issues (most of them just crash when using them). I didn’t try installing the Lenovo tools. We don’t use the fingerprint readers, so that’s a non issue for me, but if you do this might require some investigation.

Switchable graphics on the W500 and T500 doesn’t work. Also, the Intel GMA adapter seems to be a lot slower than it was under Windows Vista – so i switched these devices to the internal ATI graphics card. No issues with that, except higher power usage.

WSUS does not contain Windows 7 updates – which makes perfect sense. I created a new WMI filter and a GPO to ensure that Windows 7 got updates directly from Microsoft.

After installing Windows 7 on the devices, all hardware including UMTS modems worked perfectly. Intel AMT doesn’t have Windows 7 drivers yet, but we don’t use that either.

I migrated user data using USMT Hardlink Migration, for which i created a nice batch file using the idea from this feature walkthrough.

I’ll keep you up to date – there’s one more machine considered for migration next week, and after a weeks i’ll have proper feedback from the power users at my office. I’ll even try to persuade our head sales and CEO to try Windows 7, just for the heck of it.