Small Fish, Big Pond

I usually don’t get a new OS until it’s been out for at least 6 months so it can work out all its bugs. This was a godsend for Vista since I missed out on all the compatibility issues and had a smooth transition from XP. But since the WIN 7 beta went so well for me, and 7 is just a refinement of Vista I decided to install from day one.

Before I mention the install I want to point that Vista is a GREAT OS and light-years beyond XP. People who bad-mouth Vista (looking at you Gizmodo bloggers), either A: just parrot other articles on the web or are Mac fanboys, B: were dumb enough to install a new OS on a 5 year old computer built for XP, or C: installed on day one, got frustrated with the driver issues and never came back or fixed the issues.

Like I said, I installed Vista about 6 months after it came out, on a new system built with up to date components that were Vista certified, and I NEVER had any issues with it. Even now, 2 or 3 years later I can count the number of times I had a system crash on one hand (and I load a lot of buggy betas on my PC), where as XP I could count the number of blue screens I had in a week on one hand. Shadow copy saved ALL of my contacts, notes, tasks, and other PIM info one time when my synch schedules conflicted (due to me tampering where I shouldn’t). And frankly it’s nice not seeing the system slow down to a halt when you get within 10% of C drive being full.

Vista was a great OS and people who say XP was better were fools of one kind or another. That being said Win 7 is MUCH better. Vista was great but is was a bit bloated, Win 7 is a refinement that smoothes the rough corners and makes things a bit more efficient.

That being said, how did the transition go?

Again my system is very good and up to date hardware wise. I have a geforce 9800 GTS video card that can handle high end games. Quad core 6600 intel processor that can handle more than one thing at once. The whole system is 64 bit rather than 32 so I maxed out at 8GB memory, memory is dirt cheap so there is no reason to skimp (Vista and 7 use 1 Gig just to run). And finally for this install I got rid of my last IDE drive and filled the system with SATA2 500GB drives, and two 250GB drives in a RAID0 config to hold the OS.

Again, Win 7 is about 8 years older than XP, don’t install it on 8 year old technology.

The biggest hang-up was that the discounted copy of the Win7 I got is an upgrade edition, not standalone. I didn’t notice when I bought it so I was caught off guard when I couldn’t enter the product key on the newly formatted RAID array. 4 hours later I figured out what was wrong, threw Vista on in 30 minutes and then dropped Win7 on top in another 30 minutes.

So the install of the OS took me:

• 5 hours on Friday to organize and document everything I wanted to carryover (my system was a mess). And like I said before, I prefer to install a new OS clean just to “clean house”. Mac ads describe doing this as a detraction; with as messy as my system (and mine is cleaner than most) is it’s a benefit.
• 5 hours Saturday night to install the OS. 4 was me not noticing my mistake, 30mins me fixing that mistake, and 30 mins to install the OS on the new machine. People gripe about 8 hour install times. Even prepping my files the day before and installing the OS took less time than that. Again don’t upgrade from a mess, install on a newly formatted machine (or throw an old OS on a newly formatted machine and upgrade from that).
• 1 hour to reinstall the programs I wanted on the new machine and to run Windows update.

Except for a 4 hour mistake on my part wondering why I couldn’t load things putting Win 7 on was virtually painless. In a half days amount of time I’m upgraded and have a much cleaner, more organized computer. I’m sure I’ll still discover small tweaks to be made over the next week or two of use but for now everything is back to full operation.

Some key points people upgrading might want to be aware of:

• Upgrade disks need to be run from an existing OS, not to a blank reformatted drive. I don’t know how Microsoft detects the old OS but it needs to be there before it will install.
• When I installed Win 7 from the freshly installed Vista, I reformatted the drive during install and it worked. Again I don’t know how it knew Vista had been there, it must have left some hint in the temporary install setup files.
• All devices were discovered immediately and drivers installed on their own except for a Rosewill dual SATA port card; even the HDTV tuner card was automatic and immediately integrated into Windows Media Center. Most of my hardware is a year old or more.
• Windows Media Player data couldn’t be manually transferred over from Vista, it had to re-detect the library. The ratings and album art are embedded in the tags so they carried over but the Play-Counts are reset to zero; kind of a bummer but I use last.fm to track my music anyway. And with over 45k tracks even in 4 years most still said 0 anyway.
• I couldn’t figure out a way to move the Speech Recognition Training files over. But I hardly use it so it’s no big deal to me.

Bottom line. Easy and cheap if you have a student email address, all for a snappy upto date machine. Ars also has a great overview of of installation and quirks incase you’ve been living in a cave the last 6 months.