I recently upgraded two of my home computers to Windows 7 after purchasing the Windows 7 Home Premium family pack. This was the first time that I actually went out and purchased a boxed copy of a Microsoft operating system. The verdict? Windows 7 is impressive.
My HP machine running Vista: Can you perform a clean install using “upgrade” licensed media. Yes you can. After backing up my Vista PC, I booted from the Windows7 disk and ran a clean install. The only part that caused me any “problems” was the new Windows 7 version of FDISK. FDISK was the old DOS utility that was using to create and setup partitions to your hard drive. Even Windows XP’s setup routine used many of the same nomenclature used in FDISK. Well, Windows 7 has a new way of expressing this information that was unclear to me. I had a second computer handy to refer to a couple of websites to help me through this. Beyond that, installing Windows 7 was easy and very fast. A few questions about your time zone, username, how your computer is hooked up to a network…and bam, next thing you know you’re looking at a Windows 7 desktop. I was left picking up my jaw as I discovered that I was done. Everything (drivers) on my HP was correctly setup and running. The whole process took less than 30 minutes. (of course installing and setting up your apps is another story). Still, wow.
The other PC I setup with Windows7 was an old Toshiba laptop. This was a hand me down PC that didn’t have the original OS media, so over the years, I couldn’t reinstall the OS even I wanted to. After running the Windows 7 upgrade advisor, I figured I could install Windows 7 (minus Aero support), or go out and find and buy a Windows XP license – I went with Windows 7.
The installation on the laptop went just as smoothly as the desktop. To take a line from Apple – it just worked. Does Windows 7 perform better on this old PC? Hard to say. Compared to what it was (5 minutes to boot!), it was a huge improvement. But maybe a clean install of XP would have yielded even better performance.
To contrast the Windows 7 experience, I recently decided to reinstall Windows XP on one of my work PCs that was kind of dragging. Even with all the factory (Dell) disks, installing a fresh copy of XP is not for the novice to take lightly. Once booted into the clean install of XP, I had to manually identify and install drivers for the network card (yes, no NIC support), video card, sound card, phone modem, USB ports…pretty much everything had to be installed after the OS. If you didn’t know the individual components installed in your PC, good luck hunting down the drivers. Anyway, hats off to Microsoft for making some huge strides with Windows 7’s installation routine and bundled drivers.
So far using Windows 7 has been great. No complaints at all, and lots of pleasant surprises along the way.
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