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OK so I am going to bite the bullet and upgrade to W7 from XP. I read too many negative reviews about Vista so I gave it a miss. To do this I have purchased an external hard drive as recommended by microsoft to help with the conversion. Now, with all this extra (1Tb) capacity I am going to use it as a master backup drive for my considerable music/photo/video collection and would like to know if I can also put my many installation CD/DVD's which I have lying around on it as well. I am a bit concerned about them becoming unuseable due to some form of drm or equivalent if I do this. Any help or advice regarding this would be appreciate.d
The only way to be sure is to try each app as you go. In my experience, a good 85% of installable cds will work from a straight HDD copy. There are other ways around stubborn apps, of course, such as virtual cd/dvd drives, which should give you about a 95% chance of a useable copy.
There will always be the odd one or two which will, (and I say thie reservedly, but legally), never work in this fashion.
You use the easy migration wizard (Windows Easy Transfer): this transfers various settings. Then you install W7, and run the wizard again. It doesn't move software, but it does move user accounts, user files, email, pics etc. assuming they're in the default special folder locations or you're prepared to do a custom migration.
A few words from the wise - you will need to run the wizard under each user login, as there's no way to "batch" the process for multiple user accounts (that is certainly the case with the XP tool).
Keep a full backup copy of the "Documents and settings" folder - there's several things that the wizard doesn't transfer that you can transfer manually with selective copying and pasting from the Application Data and Local Settings folders, for example.
SD
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You can't have everything - where would you put it?
It is possible to work around the Windows XP to Windows 7 upgrade issue if you have, or can borrow a copy of Windows Vista. It doesn’t even have to be licensed since you won’t be activating it and won’t have it loaded for more than a few hours — well within the 30-day trial period. Just upgrade from Windows XP to Windows Vista, and then upgrade the newly installed Windows Vista system to Windows 7.
There is no guarantee that this will go off without a hitch, but is probably much easier than doing a clean install, which is recommended by Microsoft and most experts.
I just took the route of replacing XP with Win7 on one of my Compaq systems. Fortunately I had removed the XP disk and replaced it with another "Just in case", turned out to be a good move. After loading Win 7 I quickly realised that this was Vista with a pretty new coat, same crud underneath. Now, no network connectivity, no sound, indexing everything by default keeps slowing it down and so on, it feels so much like Vista. I had tried the early betas, same issues, you kind of hope the final version is way beyond the beta stage.
Just as an exercise I loaded Ubuntu client, surprise, surprise, network worked, sound seemed fine and it ran twice as fast, I know where the "upgrade" for this system is headed, NOT in Win 7 direction. XP disk replaced and the windows world worked again.
I think there will be some learning curve required and efficiency will be lost once you're very good in XP. The Win Explorer (not IE) is displayed differently in vista and W7. I'm still struggling to learn those new interface. again, BEWARE.
To be perfectly honest, if you believe that users should be warned off Windows 7 because the explorer interface has been altered, then you probably don't deserve to own a computer.
Its not just win explorer, i mentioned interfaces. like the search/find and a dozen others in control panel. We'll im just so busy with my airway manuals and jepp updates, no time to learn those minor things in new versions of windows. besides, instead of changing the interfaces, why not just change the internal workings of windows so oldtime users don't need to buy new W7 books from MS? MS could've done better, IMO, if they optimise the internal workings of their OS say 'Indexing' service or those resource hogging background services, instead of chaning the makeup of their baby. just my opinion.
Just got a new PC because the old one's given up on me.
The one I've acquired had W7 Build 7600 on it and was working fine. The only problem, to me anyhoo, was the message at the bottom right telling me it wasn't a genuine version and to activate it.
Didn't like Vista at all, but W7 does seem a whole lot better. Just plugged in my graphics & sound cards, connected to t'internet and it was fine.
I then decided that I would put XP on it because the wife wasn't happy with it. Being a bit of a blagger when it comes to confusers, I decided to put in my XP disc and just install it over the top of W7.
I now have a PC that won't run IE7 and was told by someone who knows better that I should've formatted my drive first before going 'backwards' to a previous operating system. Everything else works fine, but you kind of need web access. That porn doesn't download itself, you know? Have to do it properly tonight...
W7 did seem quite intuitive and well thought out and there was enough similarity to XP to make it seem 'familiar' where Vista never did. As soon as I can justify it cashwise, I'll probably get W7 Ultimate, which Build 7600 was really...
I've been running 7 in either beta or RC for some months on a separate partition to XP with the dual boot option coming up on start up. I did a clean install of my shiny new paid for 7 and formatted the partition that had held the RC version but the dual boot option is still coming up, with now the option of 7 or 7. The second 7 is as one would expect empty and I cannot find a way of getting rid of the option. I seem to remenber that you could do it in DOS but am now stuck. Any help appreciated.
Last edited by shack; 29th Oct 2009 at 14:45.
Reason: Can't spell
Download easybcd & run it to get rid of your rc bootloader & you'll be set. Boot.ini no longer works, so you have to either use bcd from the command line, or much easier, install & run this utility. Be sure to delete the correct one though, or your shiny win 7 install won't boot.
