I’ve been looking forward to installing Windows 7. My experience with Vista Ultimate on my Dell M1710 laptop (T7400 processor, 4Gig RAM) has been average at best if I’m honest, with sluggish performance being my biggest disappointment. Yes I know you can “disable this and uninstall that”, but that is not the point. Out of the box, a clean Vista installation should perform well and in my opinion it was only just acceptable.
I therefore welcomed Windows 7 RTM with open arms. I went for the 32bit Windows 7 Ultimate (x86) and having Vista Ultimate (x86) installed already meant I could do an in-place upgrade (Whoa there Clarkey! everyone shouts. A clean install is surely best. Yes you are right and normally I would whole heartily agree but my life is pretty busy right now and the thought of digging out all my old software install disks, rightly or wrongly so, was enough for me to give an in-place install a try, on a laptop that was pretty clean anyway). If you are upgrading from XP then you cannot do an in-place upgrade although you can use Windows Easy Transfer to migrate some of your settings (see Scott Hanselman’s XP to WIndows 7 post). You also cannot in-place upgrade Vista 32bit to Windows 7 64bit (and vice versa).
Before I started
Below was my starting point (System window) which shows a pretty typical Vista M1710 set up.:
I backed up my laptop (data only) to an external drive and unplugged it to play safe.
I ran the Windows 7 setup.exe and got this screen:
I’d already researched whether my laptop “could cope” so I clicked “Install now” and got the message "Setup is starting..."
I then selected "Go on line to get the latest updates".
I accepted terms and conditions. For reasons I mentioned earlier, I then selected "Upgrade" to do an in-place upgrade:
Then got told that certain apps might not work:
I cancelled the install and uninstalled all of the listed apps including itunes (not really used much on this laptop anyway). Did the obligatory reboot. Then ran setup.exe again... "setup is starting..." and had several déjà vu moments (same steps as above). This time, once past the compatibility checks I selected "go online to get latest updates" as recommended.
Next was a familiar upgrading windows screen:
This step took 2hrs 15mins (including several auto reboots) and some 540513 files were “transferred”. Umm… a fair few then.
You will then be prompted for the product key. I selected “Use recommended settings” for automatic updates.
Set region and time zones.
Skipped join WiFi network at this point.
Selected Home Network (ie for my local LAN).
Finally, I got the logon screen with my family usernames nicely appearing on the desktop. Logged on with my account and hey presto, it seemed to have worked! Why do I sound surprised… not a single service error…
Although the GeForce Go 7950 GTX graphics card seemed to be performing fine I upgraded the NVIDIA control panel version to 2.2.275 and driver to 179.48 via the NVIDIA download site anyway, just to make sure.
To prove I’m not making all this up, here’s that System window again (I had also clicked the Rate this computer button as this point to get a Windows Experience Index):
That’s it for now. It’s early days but based on the short usage last night, it all appears fine and the machine is much much snappier (a relief). I’ve not done anything to really test it yet though… I’ve got cameras to connect, video editing to try etc at some point.
Any issues, I’ll add a comment here.
Dave
