Well, as you may or not be aware, I recently bought a new laptop, a HP Pavilion tx2530. It doesn’t have multi-touch or any of the other naff that the latest TouchSmart tx2 series has, but who uses multi-touch after two days of use anyway? It does however have single touch and pen input, as Windows keeps reminding me. It also has a Windows Experience Rating of 4.3, which isn’t bad for a laptop I reckon.

The laptop came with Windows Vista Home Premium, but hey there’s a release candidate of Windows 7 floating around here, so why don’t I install it? So that’s just what I did, and now I will discuss what works and what doesn’t.

Installation

First step of any system, installing the operating system. In case things went south, I decided to keep Windows Vista installed as well. This would allow me to at least have a working system if things went wrong. So the first thing I did was to take an 80GB chunk of the main hard drive and called it my Windows 7 install, as you can see in the image of Computer.

Now that has been installed, it’s time for some driver installs. But wait, Windows 7 isn’t released as RTM yet, so what drivers to go for? Well, Microsoft claim to have 100% compatibility with Vista drivers, so a nice trip to the HP Driver Download site to get some drivers. Looking down the list, I grabbed everything, apart from the ATI graphics drivers which were very out of date, so I grabbed some dedicated Windows 7 drivers from the AMD site. Good hour of installing, and only one catch, the drivers for the sound chipset wouldn’t install because I’m running an “old” version of Windows. Thankfully Windows Update is a dream so that just fixed that problem.  Now that everything’s installed, lets see if it works.

Testing Previous Features

Now, the first thing that I need to make sure of, is that I have not lost any functionality by this move, but have indeed gained functionality, so I will test original features.

1. Sound buttons
   Now, as you may or may not be aware, the tx2530 has backlit buttons that are blue by default, but the mute button turns orange when the sound is muted. Before installing drivers, muting the sound did not cause the colour to change. After all the driver installs, this appears to work perfectly. Orange to blue and blue to orange, button or mute via windows, it all works. Not a stopper if it didn’t but nice that it does.
2. Tablet and touch
   The main point of the laptop, the touch screen and (more importantly) the tablet. After testing in Windows Journal, the pressure sensitivity from the pen, the rubber on the pen, right click, having touch enabled, all works perfectly. However I have one problem with it, and that is pen flicks. Basically you use gestures, throw up and down to scroll up and down, left to go back, and right to go forward. But wait… in Windows 7, left is forward and right is back. Sorry that doesn’t make any sense at all!?!?!? This is easily fixed however by enabling the 8 directional pen flicks and changing them manually, but that is just weird how it is in reverse by default.
3. Multimedia Remote
   This laptop comes with a tiny remote (that is almost guaranteed to be lost). Before the upgrade it used to control everything perfectly, it controls Windows Media Centre and also the QuickPlay software. After the new install, and mashing of every button on the remote, this still works perfectly, which is good.
4. Screen Image Auto-rotate
   A feature that at times has been a pain when I haven’t wanted it to automatically rotate the screen around. But heck, its still useful if you want to switch to tablet mode and not want to rotate the laptop. Shutting the screen here causes the same correct effect to happen which is good.
5. Other Features
   I have tested other features, but they are not worth of a full note, and all work perfectly. The SD Card, the monitor connection, TV out, network all work. I haven’t tested if the modem works, but then again I don’t use dialup or a modem for anything, so this really doesn’t need a test for me.

Now that these have been checked, let’s see what’s new.

New Items

The first item is quite useful, the new tablet pc input screen. Firstly, the on screen keyboard has some nice effects, firstly the buttons look nicer, and they now have a nice effect when you press them, which makes it easier to tell if you have hit the wrong button.

The pen input differs from Vista as well by as you write it does text recognition on the words and shows it where your writing once was. There are new gestures to split and merge words, and the best feature (in my opinion is if you click on a word you can view it in character mode and change letters as you go.

Summary of Part 1

Is Windows 7 worth it on my laptop? I would say definitely. Installing this has been very good so far, and in Part 2 I will be comparing battery performance as well as other features in Windows that should hopefully make it worth the switch from Vista to 7.

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This is the end of part one of this post and I will get back to this. But for now there is more Windows 7 testing to do on my laptop.