Again, the problem is not with the firmware, there is a known bug in Win7 with certain DVD Roms.

I did not need to flash the firmware, I fixed a setting in Win7 – ergo Win7 is at fault.

No I was not making shit up either.

And if you take the time to carefully read my posts in this series you will notice that I was really trying to be as fair and balanced as possible. Read Day7 for a case in point.

Why are you installing GRUB? It makes me think you’re doing some kind of crazy dual-boot situation here instead of using just Windows 7, and it’s likely that your bootloader and Windows 7 aren’t compatible with each other. Either way, it’s definitely not in the spirit of the experiment.

You’re unlucky enough to happen to have the one model of DVD-ROM drive that Windows has issues with, but note that the fix is to flash the DVD drive’s firmware– does that indicate the problem is Microsoft’s fault? Or a problem with the firmware? (My guess: the latter.) I know blame doesn’t help when you have a malfunctioning computer, but at the same time it’s unfair to blame Windows 7 for firmware bugs.

Anyway, imagine how I feel, since I’ve yet to find a Linux distribution that works with sleep/suspend on my Tablet PC without crashing when it wakes back up.

Same theme here: there’s no way Windows is locking up that much unless your hardware is faulty as shit. Your description is such that I’m starting to just think you made it all up… or if IE stops responding for more than 2 seconds you declare it “locked” and hard-reboot it.

Windows Media Player stops the Shift key from working? Seriously? You’re making shit up.

Bing search is not very intuitive, but I got to a few license related pages, the one you listed was about third or fourth down the results.

Thanks for the reply!

Google (oh sorry, you can’t) for “putty”. First link has “License”, which is that page