Windows 7 RTM Upgrading Windows 7 RC Experience!

Jerry J. Jansen — Sun, 23 Aug 2009 18:54:27 +0000

I recently installed Windows 7 Ultimate 64 bit final RTM version (I have a Microsoft Partner account) and let me tell you about my experience. First, normally Windows 7 will not upgrade Windows 7 RC. You have to modify one file before it will allow you to do the upgrade. For information about which file to modify, click here. The procedure is pretty easy and you only have to modify one file.

So I had Windows 7 RC, which is the ultimate version, already installed on my main home computer and my laptop now for several months. I have a lot of programs that are installed on my computers and having to do a clean install of Windows 7 and then to reinstall and setup all of my programs usually takes about a week. I don’t have the time to do a clean install right now, even thought a clean install is the best way to install a new operating system.

Well, the upgrade procedure went pretty smooth. I told the upgrade wizard to check for updates before installing. The procedure did reboot my computers several times. After the install, all of my programs and hardware still worked.

The only problem with the upgrade it that it was so slow! It took over 5 hours to do the upgrade on both my main home pc, a 3 GHz dual core Intel processor with 4 Gigs of RAM, and my laptop. What took so long is that during the upgrade, Windows 7 copies my current settings and programs and then at the end of the upgrade it copies these settings back.

I would of thought that since the computers were already running Windows 7 that the upgrade would of been much faster. So if you are planning an upgrade then make sure you have 2 or 3 movies that you can watch to kill the time!

Jerry J. Jansen
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Clean Install of Windows 7 Ultimate x64 Final Results!

Jerry J. Jansen — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 18:10:40 +0000

I recently installed a new hard drive on my computer at work and installed the final version of Windows 7 Ultimate. Let me inform you how the install went and any problems I encountered.

First this was a clean install on a new hard drive. I also used the final RTM version of Windows 7 Ultimate (I have a MSDN Subscription) and the 64 bit version on an HP hw8600 Workstation. The computer has a quad processor running at 3 GHz. It also has 8 Gigs of RAM and a 1.5 Terabyte 10,000 RMP hard drive. The computer itself is about 7 months old and I previously had installed Windows Vista 32 bit Ultimate. Vista x32 was a dog on the computer and I was getting to hate the computer because it was so slow. At times it would take almost 30 minutes for Visual Studio to load up my website project.

Anyway, along with the install. Installing Windows 7 Ultimate x64 as a new install went pretty smooth. The complete process took about 30 minutes. What really surprised me was the fact that I didn’t need any x64 bit drivers for the HP computer but again it is a fairly new computer being only 7 months old.

After the final boot Windows 7 seems to be running just fine. However, I did have several problems. First my Microsoft Live Mesh x64 would not install. Google Chrome and Google Gears would not install. I could not get my Xerox N32 Work center printer nor my HP DeskJet 990 CXi printer to work. Also my Epson scanner would not work. I kind of expected the scanner not to work but the printers not working was a real problem.

After doing some research on the problem with Live Mesh not installing I found out that I should do an update of the computer. So I started the Windows Update and and it said that I need about 80 updates. Waited over an hour and Windows Update said it had downloaded 0%. Well it was the end of my workday so I decided to leave the computer running and downloading the windows updates.

The next morning windows update said it had finished downloading and installing the updates and that I needed to reboot my computer. So I rebooted my computer and to my surprise, both of my printers were working again. I was also able to install Windows Live Mesh x64 and I was a happy puppy.

My scanner would not work, Epson won’t update their older scanners with 64 bit drivers. So I have a second Windows XP Professional computer running 32 bit so I installed the Epson scanner on the XP Pro computer and it is working again.

I also had several applications that would not work in Windows 7 RC but now they do in the final version of Windows 7.

So now I have Windows 7 Ultimate 64 bit installed and I am very happy! Programs run much faster including Visual Studio 2008. Not it loads my complete website project in only a few minutes. If you are running Vista on your computer then I highly recommend that you upgrade to Windows 7. There were many features of Vista that I hated and Windows 7 had fixed most if not all of them for me.