Windows 7 Tips

  • Academic “upgrade” must be run from inside a previous version of Windows.
    • If you are running 32-bit windows xp or vista you cannot upgrade to 64-bit Windows 7
    • You can do an install of 64-bit Windows xp first, and then upgrade to 64-bit Windows 7 (this is what we did)
  • To pin a “shortcut” to the Toolbar (such as the Continuity shortcut) do the following:
    • Right click on the shortcut and select “properties”. Add “explorer” at the beginning of “Target:”
    • You can now drag the shortcut to the toolbar.
    • This seems to work best with .bat files rather than .py files
  • You can’t use DejaVu when rendering surfaces; but OpenMesh rendering does appear to work

    • From Continuity select “View > Change Renderer…”

    • Click “OpenMesh” and click “OK”

  • Installing Windows 7 will create a new “bootloader” that can’t start Linux if you already have it installed on your machine
    • This information is taken from here

    • Get your Linux LiveCD (such as the Ubuntu installer). We used our Kubuntu Desktop 8.10
    • When prompted select “Try Kubuntu without making any changes to your computer”
    • Open a terminal, and type the following commands:
      • sudo grub
      • find /boot/grub/stage1
      • root (hd?,?) where ? and ? are the HD# and partition#
      • setup (hd?) where ? is the HD#
      • quit
    • However, after you restart Windows 7 probably won’t be listed in GRUB as an option. If you select Windows XP it should give you the option to load Windows 7. You can change the name of the Windows XP menu item in the menu.lst settings file.