Topic: Windows 7 upgrade - success! (Read 7675 times)

PeterAit · « **on:** December 02, 2009, 09:17:04 am »

I was hesitant to upgrade because my Vista 64 was working well and doing everything I wanted, but my inner geek got the better of me and I installed the Win 7 64 bit upgrade yesterday. I am relieved to report that all went smoothly and everything seems to be working OK, including SpectraView and printing to a 4880.

Adam L · « **Reply #1 on:** December 02, 2009, 11:20:20 am »

I had a few minor issues pop up a couple days after upgrading the wifes computer to Win7. She had recently got a new laptop from HP.

The first issue was with the HP software itself. Their Media Center stopped working and the Win7 'fixit' engine sent me to their site with a download patch. Problem was the patch itself took three tries to install.

The second issue was the Symantic Internet Security. The upgrade rendered the old 2009 version useless. Live update would not update. This was a scary fix for me because the 'fixit' engine required me to delete the old version and have the downloaded version or disks in the DVD drive prior to uninstalling the old version. With a factory installed Virus protection I had no disks and the Symantic download site wanted to install the new software before removing the old software.

After a couple hours of anxiety I decided to uninstall the old, download an update, and install it. Good news was that once the uninstall was complete, Win7 located the new download and installed the upgrade automatically - including the product Key!

I have experienced a couple screens of death since upgrading. I did a bit of research on this issue and feel that its a MS problem with a recent security upgrade. I expect they'll quietly release another update that fixes this bug.

Misirlou · « **Reply #2 on:** December 02, 2009, 11:33:50 am »

Quote from: Adam L

I had a few minor issues pop up a couple days after upgrading the wifes computer to Win7. She had recently got a new laptop from HP.

The first issue was with the HP software itself. Their Media Center stopped working and the Win7 'fixit' engine sent me to their site with a download patch. Problem was the patch itself took three tries to install.

The second issue was the Symantic Internet Security. The upgrade rendered the old 2009 version useless. Live update would not update. This was a scary fix for me because the 'fixit' engine required me to delete the old version and have the downloaded version or disks in the DVD drive prior to uninstalling the old version. With a factory installed Virus protection I had no disks and the Symantic download site wanted to install the new software before removing the old software.

After a couple hours of anxiety I decided to uninstall the old, download an update, and install it. Good news was that once the uninstall was complete, Win7 located the new download and installed the upgrade automatically - including the product Key!

I have experienced a couple screens of death since upgrading. I did a bit of research on this issue and feel that its a MS problem with a recent security upgrade. I expect they'll quietly release another update that fixes this bug.

I put W7 on my mother's newish HP laptop and ran into all sorts of issues with that HP MediaSmart add-on stuff. She didn't use that stuff anyway, and was happy enough to dump it. Other than that, I've now installed W7 on about 7 machines, and never had a problem. I only did 2 where I upgraded a copy of Vista in place; the rest have all been bare drives.

ashley · « **Reply #3 on:** December 02, 2009, 11:56:29 am »

Quote from: Misirlou

I put W7 on my mother's newish HP laptop and ran into all sorts of issues with that HP MediaSmart add-on stuff. She didn't use that stuff anyway, and was happy enough to dump it. Other than that, I've now installed W7 on about 7 machines, and never had a problem. I only did 2 where I upgraded a copy of Vista in place; the rest have all been bare drives.

I am a Mac user but my wife has a new Toshiba laptop for her work and we are waiting for the Windows 7 upgrade to arrive in about 2 weeks time. Up to now the only real software she has installed is Office and there are are a few Word files etc. from her work. Would it be safe to do a straight upgrade to Windows 7 from Vista maintaining all her existing user data etc. or preferable to make a backup of everything on an external drive and wipe the main drive for a clean install? I am guessing that the latter might lead to a more stable solution in the long run.

PeterAit · « **Reply #4 on:** December 02, 2009, 06:15:19 pm »

Quote from: ashley

I am a Mac user but my wife has a new Toshiba laptop for her work and we are waiting for the Windows 7 upgrade to arrive in about 2 weeks time. Up to now the only real software she has installed is Office and there are are a few Word files etc. from her work. Would it be safe to do a straight upgrade to Windows 7 from Vista maintaining all her existing user data etc. or preferable to make a backup of everything on an external drive and wipe the main drive for a clean install? I am guessing that the latter might lead to a more stable solution in the long run.

You certainly should back up your documents, etc., but I know of no reason not to do the upgrade (which is what I did). Of course, if it is a new computer then it won't have much in the way of favorites, user settings, and so on, so a clean install would not be that much more work.

Misirlou · « **Reply #5 on:** December 03, 2009, 12:32:54 am »

I'd certainly go for the clean install. The only reason I would upgrade in place would be to maintain a lot of settings or some cumbersome file structure. That doesn't sound like your situation.

ashley · « **Reply #6 on:** December 03, 2009, 03:30:10 am »

Thanks for the feedback, no doubt it will take a bit longer to do a clean install but I figure that if it only takes an hour or so to set everything up and reimport bookmarks etc. then it's probably a better idea. On the Mac you have both options as well, but in the long run it always seems to run better with a clean install, though I can lose up to a day simply because there is so much more to organise in my case.

Rhossydd · « **Reply #7 on:** December 03, 2009, 04:18:22 am »

Might be worth adding that some OEM "upgrade" versions of Windows 7 actually perform a clean install and reformat the HDD. This is certainly the case with the free "upgrade" to Win 7 I've received for a recently purchased Acer laptop. It's made VERY clear what will happen and the importance of backing up any personal data before installing the new OS.
Installing clean is definitely the best policy if at all possible.

For the record I recently installed Win 7 x64 and it all works very well, only a couple of old programs won't work (which I knew would happen). The only downside so far is that moving to 64bit has left me unable to use my Minolta Dimage Scan Multi Pro on my main system as 64bit drivers were never released.
Full installation took just a staggering 14 minutes onto an unformatted drive, my fastest OS installation ever.

Paul

Pete_G · « **Reply #8 on:** December 03, 2009, 08:26:24 am »

Has anyone had trouble with W7 and folders that contain large image files? On my system (64 bit) when I open up an Explorer window with some of my bigger files (tiff, around 400Mb), the dreaded green progress bar crawls across the screen as W7 extracts thumbnails from each file. This can sometimes lockup the Explorer window and even the whole machine. Switching off thumbnails globally doesn't completely solve thew problem. I thought I'd solved the problem by deleting the old thumbs.db file created by the previous Win XP, and updating the nVidia driver, but it still happens sometimes.

Rhossydd · « **Reply #9 on:** December 03, 2009, 09:03:56 am »

Quote from: Pete_G

Has anyone had trouble with W7 and folders that contain large image files?

No problems with that here. I can browse through folders containing 500mb+ files, building thumbnails can take a while, but I prefer to have that switched off generally.

Arlen · « **Reply #10 on:** December 03, 2009, 02:20:31 pm »

Quote from: Rhossydd

The only downside so far is that moving to 64bit has left me unable to use my Minolta Dimage Scan Multi Pro on my main system as 64bit drivers were never released.

Paul

So are you using another computer with the scanner? I recently upgraded to Win-7 64 bit, and haven't yet tackled how to handle my Minolta Dimage Scan Elite 5400.

mmurph · « **Reply #11 on:** December 03, 2009, 02:33:41 pm »

Agreed on the clean install - always a prefence if that is possible.

For a desktop, my favorite approach is to add a new SATA drive, about 320gb or so (I bought a handful of WD Caviar Blue for $30 each.) Do the clean install to that, then leave the old drive in the machine as-is but unpluggd, "just in case."

For a variation on that approach, I will do an install, then tweak all of my setting, do updates, and install "core" aps that I always use, like PS and Office. Then use something like Acronis to create a clone drive that I leave in the machine, unplugged and with no power. Makes it easy to do a restage if needed in the future.

I have done the same with other sever boxes when testing OS'es. Much cleaner than dual boot. Or leave them plugged in and select boot order frm the BIOS at boot.

Win 7 is clean, fast, stable on 6 machines so far. I also like the Media Center for Netflix, etc. Nice upgrade there.

64 bit works well on a Pentium D w/ 4 gb, so should work fine on all more recent boxes with at least 4gb of RAM.

Rhossydd · « **Reply #12 on:** December 03, 2009, 03:26:59 pm »

Quote from: Arlen

So are you using another computer with the scanner?

At the moment the most efficient solution is to replace my original system drive (removed to put a clean install of W7 on a new HDD) and boot back to XP 32bit for a scanning session and save the scans to one of the secondary image storage drives for later work on the 64bit system.
Rather clunky, but I don't scan from film too often now.

Arlen · « **Reply #13 on:** December 03, 2009, 03:39:16 pm »

That sounds reasonable. I don't use mine very often either, so some inconvenience is tolerable.

Misirlou · « **Reply #14 on:** December 03, 2009, 05:59:46 pm »

I put W7 64 Ultimate on my strongest machine. The reason was that I wanted to be able to do the XP virtual machine. As it turns out, the generic W7 printer drivers for my old HP do not include the option to print without a color profile (the Vista driver didn't work well either). That made it impossible to work through my process for generating custom profiles. Sure enough, the old XP drivers installed perfectly under the XP VM, and even support the bidirectional ink level utilities and so forth. So now I'm able to run everything I need on that one box, without dual booting.

That machine does dual boot Snow Leopard as well, but that's another story.

Misirlou · « **Reply #15 on:** December 03, 2009, 06:48:55 pm »

Sorry, dupe message

ashley · « **Reply #16 on:** December 04, 2009, 11:46:29 am »

Quote from: Rhossydd

Full installation took just a staggering 14 minutes onto an unformatted drive, my fastest OS installation ever.

The two install DVDs arrived today from Toshiba and the instructions didn't seem to offer an option of a clean install, so it's doing an upgrade now from Vista. I have to say the whole process has been rather complicated and slow requiring about 6 restarts to uninstall various pieces of software before the real install could even begin. So far it has taken the best part of 3 hours and it's near the end so I just hope it has all gone smoothly and will be a trouble free upgrade.

ashley · « **Reply #17 on:** December 04, 2009, 01:47:36 pm »

It has just completed now after more than 4 hours and about a dozen restarts but I am happy to say it all seems to be perfect without a single hitch or problem. Everything appears to work fine.

Author Topic: Windows 7 upgrade - success! (Read 7675 times)

Pete_G