 Hi there. My name is Ken Mayer and I'm going to be your instructor for this course. Now I've been in this business of high tech something, as they say it that way, because it's so much has changed over the last 30 years, but I've been doing that since 1981. That means that I've seen a lot of different types of operating systems from mainframe systems, from standalone systems, from the DOS machines when that first became popular with our home PCs, to Windows 3.1, Windows 95, Windows 98, that little millennium addition, and all of those different versions all the way through here, of course, to now where we're working with Windows 7. At the same time, I've worked with other operating systems. I've worked with Linux systems. I've worked with the Novell network system. So I have a wide variety of experience with the idea of what a network operating system is and what the client software is supposed to be doing for us. So I'm going to hopefully take all of that experience and talk about the things that have changed, what's new with Windows 7, and be able to basically give you a bit of the history of where we've been and what's new, what you need to be looking for as you are working with the installation and configuration of Windows 7. Now we're going to take a look at the basic Windows 7 installation options. Now I say basic because there are many ways in which you can do the Windows 7 installation, but we're going to be focusing on some of the real basics, you know, putting in the DVD ROM and doing a clean installation. Now we're going to talk about things like minimum hardware requirements, your options of 32-bit and 64-bit Windows. We're going to take a look at some of the considerations of why you might choose to do this type of installation. And I'm not saying basic means beta, it just means that you have many options. And we're going to talk about some of the types of installation errors that you could have come across and what you can do to try to troubleshoot those. So all in all, our goal is to be able to make sure that you can start with the DVD ROM of Windows 7 and be able to get to a finished installation and have a standalone. I call it standalone because we haven't talked about networking types of connections, but to be able to have a standalone working version of Windows 7. Well now in our first section we're going to talk about preparing to install Windows 7. That means that we're going to kind of give you a rundown, some of the key features, the additions of Windows 7, your minimum hardware requirements for the different versions. And we'll talk about some of the advantages you have if you go with the 64-bit edition over the 32-bit and then of course some options for installing Windows 7. Now this is going to be kind of what appears to be a sales chapter because we're going to talk about the benefits and the features and things like that about Windows 7. And it's not meant for me trying to sell it to you, but really just to get you an idea of what it is we're going to try to explore as we go through on this course. Now first of all, key features for Windows 7. Some of those are just categorized by usability. Now usability, boy I don't know where to go with that. Just thinking about the desktop and all the changes to the desktop and pinning things to the taskbar and being able to shake forms and all these new search capabilities to create libraries that are searchable and indexed to have these federation types of searches where I can actually have a search that goes out and looks at other shares and other locations. Great things in the world of usability. As far as security goes, we see a huge change in security. We have things like BitLocker to encrypt the drive and the operating system. We have the ability to utilize multi-factor authentication and it just continues to go on from there. You have Windows Defender that has been of course much improved since Windows Vista. You have the UAC control to be able to keep people from installing malware and those types of things that they might not otherwise have known were being installed in the background. A multi-tiered data protection through rights management, App Locker, again BitLocker, encrypted file systems, and it just goes on and on and on with all of these cool things that we can do. Even including the improvements to the Windows firewall with advanced features and the use of IPsec for direct access or for secure communications. With reliability and performance, we see that applications can run better and faster and can recover from a deadlock situation. That we have better tools to be able to look at how it's working, how it's running through scripting capabilities. We can have our administrators actually make their own customized tools to be able to help in analyzing what's wrong with an application or how to better fine-tune the environment. Deployment options through the WIM and the image distribution makes it easy to deploy hundreds and hundreds of these Windows 7 work stations in a simple day or a single day I should say to make it very simple to be able to put it together. Manageability, productivity, all of these have key features that have made big improvements in Windows 7 and it really is exciting. I have to say and because people who know me realize what I'm about to say is true I was not at first the biggest fan of Windows Vista. In fact you know I used to say oh man I can't wait to go back to XP like so many people said and in reality it was just that I wasn't ready for the changes that came to Windows Vista to make my life easier to run the environment, to be able to have more protection, to see better reliability, to see all these really cool features all of which have been even more improved on Windows 7. Now once I got used to it it was fine it was you know it was just a matter of maybe I've been around so long I'm one of those what's the saying an old dog trying to learn new tricks. Okay with Windows 7 you don't see any resistance for me at all I really like it and by the way don't take what I said to say oh Vista was horrible I just didn't go along with the change so smoothly as I should have and but I do like it now I utilize it now and Windows 7 I can't wait till it's released because I'm going to 7 as soon as I can. Now one of the things that has been this kind of fodder for some jokes from other operating system companies are all the editions of Windows 7 and we still have well that was with Windows Vista we still have lots of editions with Windows 7. We have the entry level edition which is the Windows 7 starter which I think comes only in the 32-bit edition. You have the value edition which means of course again we're talking about are there features that you do or don't need and if you don't need the features like some of the high-end business focused types of applications or options then why do you want to pay for them and so to me it's reasonable to have these different editions. We see this by the way in every other vendor that you go out there if you go buy a Cisco router they have multiple versions in fact they make what I'm talking about with Microsoft look like a walk in the park you know they may have up to a hundred different versions of an operating system for the same router depending on what you needed to do and what you wanted to do and you're paying for what you need and and not having to go pay for all these other features that you never use. So this is a very common very normal type of thing in this environment and I like that we are going to get a version that does what we need and we're not paying for stuff that's extra that we'll never use so they got the home basic they called out the value edition they have the windows 7 home premium your standard consumer edition in windows 7 professional they'll give you a business focused edition for small to lower mid markets you have the windows 7 enterprise which again as it talks about is focusing for large enterprises which would be those that have maybe 500 workstations or more and then of course if you just want everything that's under the hood in windows 7 you get the windows 7 ultimate. Alright so hardware requirements now depending on the version of the hardware requirements and these by the way you can read off of any right off the box if you need to but if you're looking at the hardware requirements I'm just going to kind of give you a rough summary from the low end of of windows 7 to the high end and and it's going to be difficult it's going to be difficult for you to find a PC that does not come around and meet these minimum requirements fact you'd have to go probably to a used PC site and find one that's years old to be able to go down so low in hardware that you can't run windows 7 the issue you have to be careful though in what I'm trying to say as a joke is that you can't go too old anyway because you need to make sure you have updated driver support so memory anywhere from a minimum of half a gig to a gig minimum requirement that doesn't mean you should stop there certainly add more in there if you can the CPU anywhere from the 800 megahertz to a gigahertz range of processing power the graphical card to be able to support direct x9 svga but if you go to the high end where you have the arrow types of needs and you're going to have to make sure you have a graphics card that can support that is listed as arrow capable hard drive anywhere from 20 to 40 gigabytes of storage available for the installation and for use of this operating system the optical drive support cd ROMs dvd ROMs all of those of course also available for you as well so it's really what I've just said sounds like again if you if you told me that I needed a gig a bit of ram gigahertz processor a 40 gig hard drive a dvd ROM drive and I said well that's easy I could go and get that a scrap material and put it together very simply so the hardware requirements are not that stringent for windows 7 but what I did say in talking about this and that is important is that you make sure that you have drivers that can support some of this older types of hardware as an example and this is a credit now to hila packard I have an old hp 1000 laser printer and I've had that thing for probably close to 10 years and I'm running windows vista I told you I like vista I'm running with vista and the thing doesn't have a driver and hila packard hasn't doesn't have a driver to make it work I had to kind of tweak and twist and do some stuff with the xp drivers to make it work with with my vista but I still lost network sharing capability with that printer and I know you're all telling me hey can just break out the crowbar to your wallet get a new printer they're they're mean dirt cheap and I did I went out to a local uh electronic store and I bought a brand new laser printer for 50 bucks that out exceeds whatever I was doing with my hp 1000 but that hp 1000 still runs and it's like I just can't give it up so maybe it'll be in the museum somewhere but that's the point the older stuff as much as I'm joking about it and saying it's easy to meet these requirements the old stuff may not have driver support so that's something else you want to consider when we're talking about hardware requirements a little out of scope for this particular point in which we're talking about the actual pc but make sure your peripherals also have the drivers for windows vista and remember that windows 7 is still on the horizon it's not officially released as I'm talking to you but most of the drivers from vista to 7 will still work for you just fine but always now make sure that you have the right drivers to support whatever you're working with in the hardware now you have two additions a 64-bit addition and a 32-bit addition you want to take advantage of the 64-bit processors and use the 64-bit addition of windows vista so what are you going to do you're going to get improved performance I mean if you think about it if I have a 64-bit processor I'm just running a little 32-bit operating system on there it's the operating system that's kind of the choke point now because it has its own built-in limitations of a 32-bit OS so utilize the better performance and with the 64-bit option you can have more addressable memory that's available to you certainly better device support much improved security the downside and I hate to tell you this you're going to lose the 16-bit wow now if you're not sure what I mean by wow that was called the windows on windows it was a virtual machine to be able to basically have a 16-bit DOS based operating system programs running on top of windows so if you've got an old DOS based program that you just absolutely have to run maybe some old game you can't do it in the 64-bits process or the 64-bit version of the operating system so what do you do you go to windows virtualization you install some old and equated operating system and then you can run your stuff there also you are the WIM files can only have either 32-bit or 64-bit images you can't have both now as far as the options for doing the installations this is not changed at all from any type of installation you can do a clean installation which means whatever else was on that operating or on that workstation is going to be gone you can install the cd the dvd network share you're going to run setup you know wipe out reimage basically or or re format that drive and lose whatever was there before you're going to start over clean if you choose upgrade which is nothing wrong with that then you're going to place and replace the existing operating system with windows 7 but that means that you're going to keep whatever other problems you may have already had so doing an upgrade is fine as long as you know that the platform you're upgrading is running well is running free from errors and by doing the upgrade you get to keep the applications files and settings that you already have now you can also do a migration which means that if you already have a computer that's running windows 7 and you want to move files from your old operating our source computer to the new one they now have a migration tool that allows you to migrate the files from one windows 7 machine to another windows 7 machine that's not an upgrade that's a migration from one platform to another platform both running windows 7 all right so now i mentioned all of these different versions let me just make sure that you understand what's out there as i said with windows 7 starter you're still going to have the the benefits of windows 7 the the types of things that make it easier for you to use you're going to have the improvements to your windows tax bar the pinning of of applications to the taskbar jump list uh searching being able to join the home group it's only going to be 32 bit as an operating system but you still have what you would expect for the for the use the basic use of windows 7 with the home basic you're basically going to have no limit now on the number of programs you can run you can get the thumbnail preview that you wouldn't have with the starter advanced networking support wireless networks that's probably where most of you are going to start if you want the cheapest version instead of 7 the 7 starter with the home with the home premium you're going to get the arrow which is the improvements and enhancements to the way in which you can look at the things on your desktop you're going to have the multi touch handwriting support you'll be able to create a home group share do shares that work across all your pc's dvd video playback authoring you'll have all of the windows media snipping tools sticky notes windows journal all of the things that as a home premium edition gives you those kind of features that we like to have in the multimedia realm when we talk about professional now we're moving into a business focus with the professional you're going to have all of the core business features such as being able to join a domain group policies the data protection with your network backup your encrypted file systems to be able to print to the correct printer at home or at work with the with what they call location aware printing and with your remote desktop connectivity and offline folders when you move from professional and you're still in the enterprise environment but moving to the large enterprise with windows 7 enterprise then you're going to see additions are or add-ons like bit locker what you're going to be able to protect your internal and external hard drives app locker to make sure you can't install programs that you shouldn't have access to the remote connectivity a thing we call direct access this branch office type of ability to connect to the home office and minimize the utilization of your wan link by using what they call branch cash with some of these things we're certainly going to be talking about as well as we go through here but I'm just trying to make sure that you understand you've got a lot of different versions and as you can tell from what I'm saying as you go into the upper ends of these windows 7s you're just adding on capabilities that a home user might not need and so that's why I think it's important to know that you have those different versions and that you basically as I've said already can just pay for what you need and don't have to buy a very expensive product and have half of the features never used but you still had to pay for them