My Windows 7 upgrade.

The time finally came to do something about the copy of Windows 7 RC that's been staring me in the face for a week now. I burned the disk last weekend and just couldn't decide if I should install it. Tonight I decided to go for it. At least if everything broke I'd have the weekend to fix it. Nothing has, as of yet, gone terribly wrong. I'm writing this on my Windows 7 install, but there's nothing to say it won't blue-screen any minute now. I haven't used it long enough to give you a real analysis of how it performs, but I can tell you about the upgrade process.

I'd usually not bother with a pre-release OS, but the buzz around Win7 got to me. If you're a geek like me, you probably get a bit stressed doing major updates to your main system. There are always those moments when it look like the install may have frozen, or the PC has had to restart one too many times. So here's the rundown of the upgrade process...

I decided to do an in-place upgrade from Vista 64-bit SP1, to Win7 64-bit. You can't go between the 32 and 64-bit versions in an in-place. My reason for this was two-fold. First, I'm just not feeling like reinstalling all my junk right now. Secondly, the final version will not support an upgrade from the RC (so I'd have to format in a few months anyway).

I launched the installer from within Windows Vista and it chugged away for a few minutes. I was informed that NOD32 antivirus and my printer would not function under Win7. Nifty trick. I obtained updated drivers for the printer and the new version of NOD32. Setup copied files; this proceeded quite quickly. In the next step all current settings are gathered. This was the first speed bump. It hung at 18% for a few minutes. There was a restart, then it continued.

The previously copied Win7 files were expanded. No surprises here, went smoothly. The next step installs the new OS files. In this step it seemed to hang twice and there were two more restarts. The first start-up was lengthy... very lengthy. I was getting a little worried, but everything seemed to work out.

So it works... nothing seems broken. I ran Fallout 3 a bit and it ran beautifully. My fingers remain crossed.