When I last wrote about my Windows 7 adventures last weekend, my system was in a mostly usable state but with several big question marks hanging over it.

1) I had no sound, since I could not convince my X-Fi sound card to work with Win7.
2) My system was initially crashing, something I’d been experiencing for a couple of months in Vista as well.

I’m happy to report that issue 1 is now resolved; it was a relatively simple matter to fix. I simply installed the Windows Vista X-Fi drivers using compatibility mode, and much to my surprise, they worked fine; I can look forward to some testing of various games over the weekend. (My hit list of choice: Half-Life 2 and it’s various episodes, Portal, and Fallout 3. I’d try The Sims 2 as well, but there aren’t enough hours in the weekend.)

As far as issue 2 goes, the system has been rock solid since I blasted years’ worth of dust out of the fans. Funny how that works, huh? I can’t say for sure yet that it’s fixed. The machine did run for a good 2 weeks straight over the holidays under Vista. But at this point, I’m pretty confident in saying Windows 7 is very stable and my machine is definitely liking things as they stand. Stay tuned for my post-gaming report sometime early in the week.

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