Windows 7 Upgrade

Yes­ter­day I finally decided to upgrade my main sys­tem from Win­dows Vista to Win­dows 7 Ulti­mate. It took over 15 hours to com­plete the upgrade, but it was worth every minute of it. Win­dows 7 will offi­cially be released on Octo­ber 22, 2009.

Hav­ing been play­ing with the Win­dows 7 on my sec­ondary sys­tem for a while, I could only see ben­e­fits com­pared to Win­dows Vista. Read­ing through online lit­er­a­ture, such as devel­oper blogs and reviews, it became clear that Win­dows 7 is finally what Win­dows should have released in the first place in stead of Vista.

How­ever, the spir­its are divided about whether Win­dows 7 is bet­ter than Win­dows XP. Many claim, that a well work­ing XP is as good as a new Win­dows 7, less the trou­ble you have to go through when mov­ing from XP to 7.

In fact: if you are run­ning Win­dows Vista, then Win­dows 7 is a smooth upgrade, pick­ing up all your pro­grams and set­tings auto­mat­i­cally with one excep­tion: there is no more mail client in the Win­dows Pack. If you migrate from Win­dows XP to Win­dows 7, you start from scratch, installing all your pro­grams and reim­port­ing your files from a pre­vi­ously saved back-up.

I am run­ning two Win­dows XP Pro­fes­sional set ups and 2 Win­dows 7 Ulti­mate sys­tems now. I do not change what’s good and keep my XPs, but I have upgraded my Vista instal­la­tions and I am glad about it.

The upgrade process is smooth: first there is a sys­tem check and then a com­pat­i­bil­ity check which result in a list of poten­tial issues. In my case, and I am run­ning loads of pro­grams, there were two issues: the installed Skype ver­sion would not work and there was a men­tion about the Mail han­dler. The new Win­dows 7 does not include Out­look Express like XP nor Win­dows Mail like Vista. The Euro­pean Win­dows 7 release will not include Inter­net Explorer.

Win­dows 7

Once you start the upgrade, it is just a mat­ter of patience. It took over 15 hours to com­plete the upgrade. The time will largely depend on the num­ber and kind of pro­grams you are run­ning on your com­puter as well as on the num­ber of files you have in store. My 1 Ter­abyte of hard drive space and over 3,5 mil­lion files, occu­py­ing about half of the space (just above 500 GB) didn’t make it eas­ier … The instal­la­tion process saves first your files and pro­grams, expands and installs Win­dows 7 and then replaces your files and pro­grams back on the new oper­at­ing system.

In any case, after about 15 hours, the new Win­dows 7 was installed and ready to go.

To my sur­prise, all my pro­grams are work­ing smoothly, even some antiques I am run­ning, such as a Front­page 2003 or a Pho­to­shop 7. But then all my good stuff such as Adobe’s Mas­ter Col­lec­tions 3 and 4 open smoothly with­out any prob­lem and for Skype, win­dows 7 finds online quickly the appro­pri­ate soft­ware down­load page from Skype to down­load the lat­est installer. Brilliant!

The quick and easy solu­tion is to down­load the Win­dows Live Pack. In my case I don’t need the Live Tool­bar nor Win­dows Movie maker since my Adobe Pre­mier Pro does that job more pro­fes­sion­ally. How­ever I am inter­ested in Win­dows Live Mail. When installing Live Mail, it will find your Win­dows Mail files and fold­ers from your pre­vi­ous Vista instal­la­tion and import your Mails and Fold­ers auto­mat­i­cally as well as your account set­tings. You may have to cre­ate the rules again.

It’s with joy that I can say now Bye-Bye to Vista, one of the worst rip-offs Microsoft has ever come up with. Talk­ing about rip-off: The price for the upgrade to Win­dows 7 from Vista is well described at Ars Tech­nica. It’s another rip-off at least for the Ulti­mate ver­sion, how­ever, if you use a Microsoft prod­uct, you may as well use the best, the oth­ers often are even less worth their money.

PS: This post was edited with IE 8 on Win­dows 7  which seems to work fine Word­Press; even the flash image uploader pro­vides a smooth experience.

• dows 7 email

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Tags: Upgrade to Windows 7, Windows 7, Windows 7 Install, Windows 7 Upgrade, Windows Vista

This entry was posted on August 23, 2009 at 4:04 am and is filed under Windows 7, Yorgo Nestoridis. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.