Yes dear readers there has been trouble in paradise. Windows 7 has literally turned my world upside and on top of that it would no longer respond to my touch. All good relationships go through a rough patch every so often, but will we be able to kiss and make up or is this the end of the road for Windows 7 and me?
Over the last couple of days I’ve been trying to iron out all the kinks you encounter once you’ve installed Windows 7 on the N50. Although Windows Update neatly installs all the drivers that are missing from the initial installation this is not a cure to all ailments. Seeing as the N50 has a built in camera I wanted to try out some of the augmented reality tools you can find online. In their simplest form these mainly include altering your webcam feed by, for example, changing your face into that of an alien or in this case a transformer which follows the movements of your head and distorts your voice. To my surprise all images shot by the webcam were rendered upside down which meant none of the facial recognition worked. Although being upside down is somewhat fun for the first 5 minutes it starts to come pretty irritating after a while.
Luckily Google is your friend when it comes to all computer mishaps like these and a quick Google search assured me that I wasn’t the only one suffering from “webcam-upside-down-itis”. Seeing as the webcam worked fine under Vista I knew it probably had to be a driver issue so after trying the drivers from the manufacturer of the webcam I downloaded the original Vista 64bit driver from the Asus website which although not designed for Windows 7 solved the problem once the computer was fully rebooted.
The next hurdle were the hotkeys. Under Vista they work very nicely and have great on-screen icons that clearly indicate what action is currently being performed. Under Windows 7 none of the keyboard hotkeys seemed to work anymore. I had expected them not to have the fancy icons but not working at all, was as a bit of a surprise. They apparently also rely on some tools which you can download from the Asus website. But which ones? Luckily they are conveniently named with words like OSD and Hotkey in their titles so that mystery was easily enough solved. At the moment they also aren’t available for Windows 7 but once again the Vista 64bit versions came to the rescue, if you select the ones for your particular model that is. If you accidentally select the wrong model, they do not…
Luckily everything, with exception of the facial recognition login, seems to work now, and that’s just because I haven’t had time to play with it yet as I’m sure the Vista 64 version solve that as well. Overall getting Windows 7 to run wasn’t too hard but getting all the extra features of the laptop to work was not as easy as it first seemed and definitely not for the faint hearted or the computer illiterate.
With having Windows 7 all working I really need to get my head down and get some work don
