Saturday, March 20, 2010

Danger, Will Robinson, Danger! (Updated)

Since I've retired from the military, there isn't much adventure in my life.

Today: adventure, danger, reckless abandon!

Yes, I'm upgrading my Vista machine to Windows 7.

You folks stay here, keep the home fires burning...and if I'm not back in a couple hours, call the President.

And as long as I'm paraphrasing one of my favorite movies, here have John Carpenter and the Coupe de Villes in a really crappy music video doing the theme song:


The upgrade appears to have worked perfectly.

The machines is now running on Windows 7, Vista has been consigned to the dustbin of history right next to New Coke.  All of my hardware is working, so is all of my software.

It was probably one of the easiest upgrades I’ve ever done.

Detailed post to follow.


  1. Hope you have better luck than I did!

  2. Please let us know what you think because I sent Windows 7 to my son, hoping his HP would perform better without the Vista hog on it, but then I started hearing negative things about it. At first I read glowing reviews, but after a few months, criticisms surfaced. Now I don't know if I only made things worse, and wasted my money.

    I can't find out that much from my son because he isn't as into computers as I am; he makes only the minimal effort to set things up, with no tweaking.

  3. I love Windows 7.

    However, I refused to do an upgrade (that just never goes well), and instead did a clean install on all the computers I upgraded.

    The clean install went perfectly every time, and the only major issues I've had were linked to Adobe CS3.

  4. Make sure you upgrade your drivers to Windows 7 compatible before you start the upgrade.

  5. Beastly, yes. I ran the compatibility checker first, and then upgraded the drivers it flagged. I couldn't update the driver for the old laser printer, so I deleted it. However, I left the printer plugged in, and after the upgrade Win7 installed drivers from its integrated library and reinstalled the printer on its own. Works fine.

    Michelle, I understand. But in this case I wanted to do an upgrade. I normally do a clean install, however, the thought of having to re-install all of my apps just filled me with a giant case of the meh's. Just didn't wanna do it.

  6. I've been running 7 on my sandbox system since the first beta versions hit the web and am more then happy with it. That said I have put off installing it on my Alpha machine for the same reasons - I really don't want to re-install everything. I'll probably bite the bullet next weekend because my current XP install is getting cranky again and needs a good talking to...

    upele - something political between a donkey and an elephant?

