Back when I got my first PC at 2004, there were practically no use of it for my school educations and lack of internet meant I couldn’t do something more than playing games, listening to songs, watching movies and creating documents/spreadsheets for dad and occasionally printing them. Being immensely attracted to PCs at that time, I spent a lot of time customizing Windows at first. Subsequently, I had my first hands-on with Linux and at some point of 2005/06, switched to Linux as my primary OS. But the important point here is that switching to Linux wasn’t catalyzed by open source philosophy, rather by my own inquisitiveness of trying new things out. Along came Windows Vista, in 2007, and I switched back to it. Well, people can still raise their eyebrows and criticize Vista and my ass for changing to it but I don’t give a damn. It worked for me for one and half years, and again it was time for swapping OS. January 2009 gave us Windows 7 Beta, officially (not talking about guys who got it a month ago via torrent sites) and it started my tryst with Windows 7 which is still going strong. Also in the meantime I tinkered with OS X on my PC, namely Hackintosh.

People might wonder why I’m giving details of my computer usage? There are a lot of people using numerous kinds of operating systems around the world, so what’s the big deal? Actually, the post is about productivity and customizability and as I understood, it has a lot to do with my usage patterns. At this moment being a student of theoretical physics, I need to do a lot of mathematics and Mathematica is great piece of code to help me in this regard. Apart from that I do read a lot of PDF books, compose some articles, make some presentations for university, and seldom play some games. So the question is what can be a reasonable OS for my usage negating time wastage? A lot of software I use have cross OS compatibility, so operating system isn’t a problem, right? Well, it’s wrong. Even after being enrolled in University, I used all the major OS available in market for my productivity purposes and found out that for some reasons Windows and Mac OS X stand out among the crowd. I can see the Linux evangelists are already pissed off and almost reached their mouse/keyboard to close the tab but at least let me explain myself. The reason I’m going to give isn’t a brilliant invention of my super genius mind, rather a plain old one. It’s that I need a stable, ready to work machine just after the installation of operating system. Too bad, except Ubuntu and its spin-offs, nothing in the Linux category offers that to me. The customizability is quite great, I must say and I enjoyed my time with that before. Windows/OS X comes nowhere near what you can do with Linux in terms of customizing your OS to suit your needs. But there’s a catch as customizability can be unending. And for a person like me who can’t even choose a right theme for his website, the feature can be quite time consuming. What I felt after using OS X Snow Leopard for two weeks is that it’s undeniably the fastest and less troublesome way to be productive. Actually, I finished writing articles a lot faster in OS X than in Windows where even to search for meaning of a word, I need to browse. I know I can install dictionaries in Windows/Linux but still that’s not my point. When I’m doing things seriously, I need other particulars ready to go, just after the start. And in that case, even though Linux is a really good operating system, it’ll remain a hobby for me.

Windows 7 pre-RTM builds are already hugely popular among technology enthusiast. And now, with the public release of Windows 7 Release Candidate, Microsoft advanced another step to bring a super solid operating system on the market that actually works. Since Windows 7 requirements need fairly lower resources in today’s terms, PCs from circa 2005-06 can also run the OS effectively. Unfortunately, it appears that Windows 7 installation DVDs are not bootable in most of these old PCs, making it difficult for a clean installation. As I do have an old PC on my home too, I decided to dig into the matter and find some fixes.

Technically speaking, those yesteryear computers don’t have capabilities built into their BIOS to boot from current Windows 7 DVDs, causing ‘CDBOOT: Cannot boot from CD – Code: 5’ error. While they can easily boot from a Windows Vista disc, seemingly some changes regarding EFI on Windows 7 booting structure shun them to boot from a Win 7 DVD.

Fear not, my friend! Hopefully, it’s still possible to perform a clean installation from Windows 7 disc instead of going through an already installed OS on these old PCs. All you require is a Windows Vista DVD along with Win 7 installation disc. Since, Vista DVDs are still compatible with these old hardwares, it’s possible to boot from them. Follow the next steps for a successful and clean installation of Windows 7,

Step 1. Pop in the Windows Vista DVD on your PCs DVD drive and set the computer to boot from it.

Step 2. Once booted, choose “Repair your computer” from ‘Install Windows’ window.

Step 3. A new window named ‘System Recovery Options’ will open. Click on ‘Command Prompt’ from there to get a CLI based window.

Step 4. Once you get the command prompt on screen, the most important part of whole procedure starts. Just input the drive name of your DVD drive on command prompt, such as D: or E: or whatever applicable. In my case, I typed E: and pressed enter.

Switch to your DVD drive on Command Prompt

Step 5. Get the Vista DVD out of drive and put in the Windows 7 disc now.

Step 6. Back in the command prompt, with your DVD drive selected there, type ‘dir’ (without quotes) and press enter. Now it’ll show the contents of your current Win 7 disc. Change the directory to ‘Sources’ by typing ‘cd Sources’ (again without quotes) and pressing enter. You’re now in the directory/folder where setup files for Windows 7 reside. Type ‘setup’ and press enter. You’re done, the Win 7 setup will just begin from there.

As it can be seen, the process involves of booting the computer from a Vista installation disc and then starting the actual installation of Windows 7 from its own media. It’s just a nifty trick to get the work done without customizing or editing anything on the original Win 7 DVD.

N.B. Newer PC users don’t need to apply this trick beforehand. Just check if your PC can boot from your Win 7 disc. If it does, then the above stated steps are not required.