Yep - I've got it running on my touchsmart. It took a couple of days to get it done, due to a few problems, but it's up and running properly now.

There's a couple of things you need to be aware of - firstly, none of the HP drivers will install under windows 7 at the moment. They seem to specifically check for Vista, so if you attempt install under Win 7, they will fail with a message along the lines of 'your operating system fails to meet minimum qualifications'.

Here's how I did it (there may be easier ways, but it worked for me)...

Firstly, make sure your new Touchsmart has all the latest HP drivers and updates for Vista installed. Physically go to the driver download page and grab/install them all rather than rely on the HP update program as that doesn't always find all of them.

To get around the lack of Win 7 drivers, do an upgrade to Win 7, rather than a new installation. If I were you I would buy an external USB 500gb hard drive and use something like Acronis disk tools tools to clone the existing drive. That way if it all goes horribly wrong, you can crack open the USB drive and replace (or reclone it back) the drive in the touchsmart.

Start Vista, put the 64 bit Win 7 in the drive and perform an upgrade. It'll take an hour or so, but it's reasonably painless. After the upgrade, everything should be working, with possibly the exception of sound - for some reason I can't get it working on the Win 7 installation, even though all the drivers are installed.

Out of the box, the multitouch stuff won't be automatically enabled, you have to upgrade the driver. The company that makes it has recently released a Win 7 beta version of it which you can download from here:
http://www.nextwindow.com/windriver/index.html
Be absolutely sure to read all the installation details before you attempt it as there's a couple of things you need to do to get it to work (disabling UAC and typing in a BCDEDIT command to get the unsigned driver to install on 64 bit windows 7).
After that's installed, you should have multitouch. you can test this by going on to the desktop and doing a zoom gesture - the icons should grow insize.

Something else to be aware of with the PDC build of Windows 7 we got last week, although they showed multitouch working in Microsoft paint, it isn't actually in the build they gave us, which is an older build. I'm sure that December's Beta will have it.

I've not quite got as far as building any multitouch stuff with Expression Blend yet, but that's coming up this week.

Good luck, it's not as hard as it seems! Let us know how you do and ask any more questions if you need to!

Richard.

No problem Tony, hope it works for you.

I've put all the details of how to get Windows 7 onto the Touchsmart over on my blog right here. It's pretty much the same information in my post above, but expanded a little. I'll keep that posting up to date as new beta's of Windows 7 come out and other stuff is learned.

I'm also planning on posting some samples of multitouch programming in Expression Blend, once I start to do some, so it may be worth keeping an eye out over there as well.

(Hope this post doesn't break any HP rules!)

Sevensteps said: Great, that helped a lot. The one thing I noticed though is that the windows don't dock after upgrading. It works fine when running Win7 in a virtualbox. Any suggestions anyone? And maybe somebody knows a solution to the sound problem? Doesn't work with me either. Bye, Bart

I have Win 7 installed on two machines now - on the Touchsmart, I don't get the side docking on Windows, but on my Dell Laptop, I do.

I'm putting it down to the fact that the Dell laptop is running 32 bit version, whereas the Touchsmart is running the 64 bit version. I'm assuming that feature hasn't made it yet to 64 bit - although, of course I'm just guessing!

You don't have to upgrade Vista - you can resize the partition and install Windows 7 side by side with Vista.

The Vista drivers from the HP site work fine under Windows 7 - the installers don't work so you have to extract the drivers themselves using winrar. I have more details on my blog:

http://blog.ehuna.org/2008/12/windows_7_running_on_hp_touchs.html

including a bunch of links and information on how to enable the docking in the Windows 7 PDC build.

Emmanuel
Check out our personal site at www.ehuna.org

roaeja said: I guess common folks have to wait for W7 to come out?

By "common folks", I assume you are not a developer or your company is not sponsoring you to a developer conference like PDC.  You have a few other options:

1) You could apply to become a Windows 7 beta tester.  I don't have an exact link, but here's some information from Paul Thurrott - http://community.winsupersite.com/blogs/paul/archive/2008/12/16/windows-7-bet...

2) There are numerous reports that build 7000 of Windows 7 has been leaked into the torrent sites.  I would never do this, but if I wanted to download Windows 7 I'd install a BitTorrent client such as http://www.utorrent.com/ and then I'd point my browser to one of the BitTorrent tracking sites such as http://www.demonoid.com/files/ .  Not that I'd ever do this, but searching for "windows 7 beta" would probably give me a link to the latest Windows 7 Beta 1 ISO (build 7000, not yet oficially released by Microsoft) - I could then burn and installation DVD.

Bear in mind that there are bugs in these earlier beta builds of Windows 7 - you may need to spend some time figuring out how to install drivers, why certains apps don't work, etc... 

As a developer, I'm willing to spend this time not only to get acquainted with new features but to make sure my software will work once Windows 7 is released - you need to evaluate whether this would be worth your time and effort.

Emmanuel
Check out our personal site at www.ehuna.org

I've been runnning it on my 816 for about 24 hours now. Its running smooth. I have yet to have a lock up, which is good considering I'd get about 6+ a day in Vista.

Which TouchSmart do you have? I'm not sure of the specs on the older ones. If they are 64 bit then you would want to run the x64 installer.

x64 is fine for both IQ500 and IQ800 series.

If you have a dual core cpu and 4 gigs of ram, then 64 bit. (Dual core CPU's work with 64 bit OS's).
If you use the 32 bit version and have 4 gigs of ram, then the OS will report 3.5 gig's. If I'm not mistaken, it will be able to access the full 4 gigs but not report the full four gigs.

David

http://i99.photobucket.com/albums/l299/xz550rj/HPMagicGiveaway.jpg

Woohoo! I won my Touchsmart!

ehuna said:

robdam1001 said: Has anyone installed the W7 Beta on their TS? If so, what are your results/findings?

Yes, I first installed Windows 7, build 6801 from the PDC.  On Friday I installed Windows 7, build 7000 - here are my notes:   http://blog.ehuna.org/2008/12/windows_7_running_on_hp_touchs.html All drivers are working and the performance and new Windows 7 features are awesome.  I (theoretically) also got the HP TouchSmart software re-installed as well - here's how you could theoretically do it: http://blog.ehuna.org/2009/01/how_to_reinstall_the_hp_touchs.html Good times!