Home-Tech

Like many, I pre-ordered my copies of Microsoft Windows 7 back in June of this year.  Amazon.com was taking orders, and you couldn’t beat the value: $99 for the Windows 7 Professional Upgrade version! So I ordered two copies, one for my laptop and the other for my main PC.

Locally, some of the office supply stores are offering a similar discount; but it seems they are tying it to a new PC purchase.

The installation was much easier than any of the articles I read online and in the tech magazine. I saw on the Toshiba site (my laptop is a Satellite with AMD Turion 64) that if I didn’t back up everything, when I installed Windows 7 it would erase it all!

Well, that’s just not the case.

Normally, I don’t put anything on the Windows drive except Microsoft and Windows files. So it wouldn’t have been any great loss if it had erased the drive. If you’re a techie-type person, you know that you can partition a single hard drive into multiple logical drives (C, D, E and so on).  In this way, you can set aside one drive - usually the C drive - just for Windows. Then have other drives for all your programs, photo’s, games, etc.

In case you’re wondering, there’s a great partitioning program out there called Easeus Partition Master. There are two flavors: the Home Edition, which is free for home users only; and the Pro version which costs less than $40. It is the best and fastest partition tool I’ve ever seen or used. And I’ve used several - all of which at the time were a lot more than $40. And there’s nothing wrong with the free version. It just works!

Back to the upgrade…

Check out the Tech Net site for information on the Windows 7 upgrade. It’s a bit different depending on whether you’re coming from Windows XP or Windows Vista.

From the time that I started running the Windows Easy Transfer tool - (to move all of my settings to an external hard drive - you can use a USB Flash Drive as well) - until completing the installation of Windows 7, was about 2 hours.

The transfer tool did it’s job, moving about 12GB of data to the external Seagate drive.  Then I started up the Windows 7 upgrade - it installed and worked!

I was really surprised how easy the backup and installation was. You need to know that I have been working with and installing Windows Operating Systems since version 3. And before that, I used an Apple Macintosh 512KE, which has (yes, it still runs - as long as I change out the 9 volt battery!) Microsoft Word (called Word for Macintosh) on it. Don’t tell me you didn’t know that Microsoft Word was running  in a GUI (Graphical User Interface) on the Mac - long before Windows came on the seen!?

Anyway, back to the Windows 7 installation. If you are considering upgrading, you should use the Windows 7 Upgrade Advisor - to verify that your system can actually be upgraded. In my case, I recently built my Main PC, so I knew it would work. But yes - I ran the tool  - just in case :)  - because with software, there always seem to be surprises.

According to all I’ve read, if you are upgrading from Windows XP, you’ll need to re-install every program on your PC. Well, that’s a bit of a stretch. I can say, based on my experience that you will need to re-install all your programs that tie directly into the Windows operating system. Many don’t. And those that don’t, won’t need to be re-installed. In most cases, I just had to provide my serial number or key codes again. But you won’t need to re-install them all.

Of the major programs,  those I’ve had to re-install. Programs such as:  Adobe Photoshop Elements, Adobe Acrobat Reader, CutePDF Pro, CutePDF Writer, Dreamweaver CS3, Corel Paint Shop Pro X2, Corel Painter Essentials 4, and of course - Microsoft Office XP. [I love Office 2007 - but will need to save up some more pennies first.]

Right now, I’m just finishing up cleaning out all the old programs that I won’t need anymore. It’s a lot of work…I have about 2TB’s of storage. (That’s 2 TRILLION BYTES of data storage space!) It’s not all filled, but cleaning up on this system, that means trashing hundred’s of Gigabytes of files - all being sent to the Recycle Bin.

I’ll try to update you on my experiences installing and running Windows XP Mode later. Suffice it to say - it really works!

– David