Last night I upgrade our 4 Vista PCs to Windows 7 RTM Ultimate. Note there is no direct upgrade path for Windows XP. However MS provide tools to migrate your settings (you could upgrade to Vista first if you were really despite). And yes a clean install is always best, however I just don’t have the time for that. My dev machine however will eventually be a clean install.
Long time to install
All the upgrades took about 3 hrs to complete. One PC said ”Expanding Windows files 21%” for over 30mins. I was just about to give up and reboot when the install started to show life again. In the end all upgrades completed and ran OK.
On the MSDN forums users are complaining of lockups at 62%. Despite letting it run for several hours (even a few days) it remains locked and the PCs once rebooted actually recover and rollback to the original OS.
So take note of the warnings at the start of the installed and uninstall problem apps before you begin. One user reports he tried to install a second time with success after first doing the following…
- Uninstalled old programs that I knew I was no longer using.
- Disconnected my normal network shares (mapped drives).
- Unplugged all USB connected devices other than mouse/keyboard.
- Installed the very latest Windows 7 x64 driver from ATI for the Radeon (mine was about a month behind).
Skipping Product Key
Near the end of the Install it prompts for your a product key. To skip this just press Next. You can enter your key later via the Windows System window. This gives you 30 days free trial. I just wanted to put off this horrible task until I could copy & paste keys over the network.
If you do plan to skip over the key entry (and say purchase Windows 7 in Oct), then make sure the version you install is the same as the version you will buy later on. EG. A Pro key wont work on an Ultimate installation.
Upgrade w7 RC –> w7 RTM
My tablet PC had Windows 7 RC and normally this cannot be upgraded. Reinstalling a tablet from scratch is very long job so I used the hack published on Windows Engineering blog that unblocks this upgrade path.
- Extract all file from the Win7 .ISO to a folder (mounting the ISO as a drive, or extract using WinZip12 etc).
- Edit the text file “sources\cversion.ini” by changing the line “MinClient=7233″ to ”MinClient=7100″ (7100 build no. for W7 RC).
- I created a new ISO file and burnt a new disk. The upgrade succeeded this time.
The Tablet PC flys now. Win7 is definitely faster than Vista.
Upgrade paths
As far as I know (took this off the MSDN forums) these are the valid upgrade paths
- VHP > W7HP or Ult
- VBusiness > W7Pro or Ult
- VUlt > W7Ult
- x86 > x86
- x64 > x64
Problems
Compared to the absolute nightmare of upgrading to Windows Vista this was a dream. Problems were easy to fix.
- PowerDVD locked up playing BluRay disks. Reinstalled latest patch & rebooted – fixed.
- Virtual CloneDrive – was crippled (no right-click popup menu or drives, just the options dialog). Reinstalled v5.4.3.2 over the top of the old – fixed. Sometimes this disappears from the tray and I just need to run the app again to make it show up again.
- Media PC – Had to rescan all TV channels and download Beta version of Ice-TV Win7 Guide (Australian TV) – fixed.
- Shared Printers needed to be reshared – fixed.
- My Canon Scanner’s Vista driver did not work, however I reinstalled this in Vista compatibility mode – fixed (see below for more info).
Play To
This is a fun W7 feature. Allows you to play music to another PC or XBOX etc. Go to “Control Panel > HomeGroup” and create (first time) or join the homegroup. Do this for all PCs. On the host PC go to Media Player > “Stream” and enable the remote and allow options. You can now right click a music track in WMP on your PC and play it to the host PC.
Initially our Tablet (was W7 RC) was registered as creating the HomeGroup. The password would not work on any other PCs. There’s an option to remove the PC from the HomeGroup. I did this and created the Group this time from our main Media PC. This time all PCs could join using the password. This may have been because we used the RC->RTM hack on the tablet install.
Small footprint
Our Vista laptop had only a 60GB hard drive with 22GB free. After installing Win7 we now have 33GB free. Cool.
Memory Usage
Our laptop has only 1GB ram and struggled under Vista. Load 2 apps and you went to the swap file. Windows 7 is no better. Like Vista it wants 2 GB RAM to function properly.
Hard disk upgrade
But then I remembered that Windows Disk Management (Control Panel) allows you to resize partitions. So I was able to grow the new partition back to full size in a couple of seconds.XBOX and LINKSYS DMA2100 Media Center Extender
XBOX and and our Win7 Media box behaved like old friends. All the new Win7 trim and effects are visible.
Delving into the Linksys system menu I found there was a new firmware upgrade available for download. After downloading and rebooting the new Win7 experience worked fine.
CanoScan LiDe 70 Crashing Windows 7
My Scanner didn’t work with Windows 7. I followed the advise on the MSDN forums to install the driver and support software underVista SP2 compatibility mode. Now works fine.
- Uninstall CanoScan driver and support software.
- Search for all CanoScan install executables. On each Right-click > Properties > Compatibility Tab and set to Vista SP2.
- Reinstall. This time the scanner was recognized when plugged in. No reboot was required.
- App Compatibility – If you use Daemon Tools, uninstall it before upgrading as it’s not compatible. Use the free Virtual CloneDrive from SlySoft.com. Great little ISO mounter. Also Sibelius 2.x seems to work fine despite all the warnings.
- Fast Win 7 Download Link – Not all Windows 7 download links are equal. @scottgu from MSFT posted this link http://tinyurl.com/win7fast – It was a factor of 10x faster than the MSDN subscriber downloads (which was pretty clogged on the first day of downloading).
- Windows 7 is Self Healing – Windows 7 does contain some self healing smarts. So if you have a driver, or even a video that wont work. Try again. On the 3rd or 4th attempt you may be surprised to find that the device or video suddenly starts working correctly. It may be moved to a compatibility mode. The self healing system is completely silent so a little disconcerting, but I guess it has a happy outcome.
Tags: Windows 7