I am bored with Vista, and the Windows 7 RC came along at about the right point in time (The annual Windows reinstall was due), so I decided to take the plunge. It's a bit of a risk for primary work machine, so I prepared everything late on Friday, pulled DVD's for software out, and an XP Pro DVD just in case! By and large it was pretty smooth, but here are the issues I did run in to:

Windows installer could not expand set up files

This was an odd error where the installer started, but sat on 0% expanding for an hour or more, then told me that it could not get the files required. A bit of digging turned up that I should try a burn of the RC ISO file on a different machine, or at a different speed. So I tried on my desktop, 8 speed burn with Nero. Resolved!

Apache 2.2.4 could not install

Installing popped up a number of errors, least of all that no httpd.conf and other files were missing, and the httpd service had a permission error. I tried a few suggestions online, but nothing worked. The I used the most up to date version, 2.2.11 at the time of writing, and had no issues at all, Windows let everything pass and it worked first time.

ColdFusion 8

Great news – no issues here, worked first time.

In General, it's a pretty good experience, I like the sleeker taskbar and how it hangs together, I am only on day 2 of using it, so that may change.

URL Rewriting allows you to recode ugly URLs like

into something like

...while having a valid url...

...still passed to ColdFusion or your coding language of choice.

Using the url examples above I will take you through implementation of rewriting in Apache with mod_rewrite and in IIS using a plugin ISAPI_Rewrite.

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