Greetings. I just finished spending a considerable chunk of my remaining time span on this planet going around in circles -- literally -- with Windows 7 RC.

I was attempting to install Microsoft's release candidate on a fairly conventional dual core Intel box, which was configured in a comparatively prosaic manner.

The problem? Every time the install process neared completion, the system would go into a reboot loop, creating the dreaded "Thank you sir, can I have another" scenario that we all (well, most of us, anyway) dread to experience.

I won't relate the sordid tale of the various blind alleys and false leads I tracked down in my attempt to solve this problem. There are lots of suggestions out there ... "Try a different disk!" "Don't you know Win 7 gets upset with more than 2G of memory?" "Try stuffing Silly Putty in the DVD drive!" ... and so on.

In the end, the solution was simple, at least in my situation. Pull the plug.

Not the AC power plug -- the DVI plug.

Ya' see, the box I was working with has a dual-head NVIDIA display adapter to which I have connected two monitors, a main DVI monitor and a secondary VGA.

It turns out that the drivers included with the Win RC 7 distribution do not play well with various NVIDIA devices.

To get the installation to complete, simply unplug (powering down the associated monitor will probably not suffice) the DVI cable from the box, and use a VGA monitor for the install. If you only have DVI on your system, you've got a bigger problem, and may need to install with a different motherboard then bring the installation disk back to the original system. Or perhaps you can work your way through the installation blind (using another system as a guide) without any monitor -- painful but maybe possible.

Once the Win 7 install completes, run Windows Update immediately, and you should find a new NVIDIA driver in the optional updates section. Download, install, reboot -- and you should be able to reconnect your DVI monitor and start hacking to your heart's content -- if you really want to call working with any version of Windows "hacking" ...

Hopefully this little saga might save someone a bit of time and a number of ripped-out hairs. I'm still trying to figure out some sort of dual-boot MBR problem associated with the install, but that's small potatoes at this point.

By the way, did you know that in Windows 7, Microsoft replaced the "ping"
command with the "bing" command?

That's a joke, son ... just a joke.

--Lauren--