My new system has been up and stable for the past 6 days now. I ordered a new PC the day of my Athlon weather PC's failure: Lenovo IdeaCentre H210 H3643 (53552NU) Pentium dual-core E5200(2.50GHz) 4GB DDR2 320GB Intel GMA 3100 Windows Vista Home Premium 64-bit which came in at $.02 under $400 US from Newegg and had the critical serial port I wanted for my Vantage Pro2. I received it Friday afternoon and immediately set to work.
First cleared the HD using Acronis Disk Director, then installed Win7 x32 version after encountering an initial install failure due to an odd BIOS lanboot setting being enabled. All hardware was recognized by Win7 and I didn't have to search for any drivers. To get GB wired lan installed I did install a Rosewill PCI card I had on hand. The Vista drivers for that had to be downloaded and installed in Vista compatibility mode after which I was connected to the net again on that PC.
I prettied up the install by downloading a couple more themes, then by immediately loading Firefox 3.5 with XMarks to recover my bookmarks. I also installed Adobe Reader 9, AVG Free, Acronis True Image 2010, WAMP Server, and all Win7 upgrades before I restored/installed my weather software programs and copied my web pages to /wamp/www. I copied all relevant directories from my crippled x64 install of 10/13 to the new computer before reinstalling everything into the same directories. My biggest headaches involved the SoftWx programs, especially Virtual Vantage Pro. It refused to work until I installed and then ran it in WinXP SP2 compatibility mode. I therefore also installed Startwatch and Vantage Pro Live using the same parameters. ImageSalsa and MovieSalsa received the same treatment. Cerberus FTP installs and runs flawlessly into Win7 without compatibility tweaks.
VWS, WeatherLink 5.7.1, and WD were next, and only WD gave me problems. That was because I couldn't remember how to set it up and if I had only just used the help resources right away I would have been OK. I wasn't getting updates to my still stealthy WD web page or clientraw data files until I reread how to set it up and found all of the right parameters to tick or untick.
The new Lenovo Win7 x32 weather PC is thus far humming along. Just now I activated Win7 on it, and I need to be sure my Acronis backups are functioning properly before I put it on the back burner again.
