I have mostly installed Win 7 on a clean machine till now (many number of times counting the Beta and the RCs). I have usually found the clean install very fast and straight forward. I am yet to come across a scenario where I had to download and install drivers with Win 7. Almost always it was able to find the drivers from the MS and get the system up and running in no time.
This weekend I decided to get my laptop onto Win 7. I have been putting this task away for quite sometime as my laptop has a multitude of software installed and I hated having to spend the time to reinstall everything.
So this weekend I decided to go the upgrade route. So I upgraded my Vista install to Win 7. Initially the setup came up with a list of software already installed that would not work with Win 7. Surprisingly this included SQL Server 2008. I did some “binging” and found a number of references of SQL 2008 needed SP1 to work with Win 7(SQL Server on Windows 7). So I un-installed all the mentioned software and then went ahead with the upgrade.
Well it went on for a couple of hours and I just let it run overnight. Next morning I had a running Win 7 with most of my programs working fine (At least the ones I have used till now). There were a couple of clinks. My gadgets settings did not migrate correctly. I actually had to remove and re-add the weather gadget to get it working and my clocks had been reset. But these were very minor problems, easily rectifiable.
So if you are upgrading to Win 7 then be ready for the upgrade to take a lot longer than a clean install.
Hey Anand, long time, no talk. How are you?
I successfully installed Windows 7 on a VMWare. It complained first about the product key not being configured properly, I did some search and found out that the problem was with VMWare workstation (even the latest version doesn't officially support Windows 7 yet). Tried without the key and Windows 7 installation was a breeze.
Now, need to upgrade my laptop. :)
Posted by: Gopinath Sundharam | October 26, 2009 at 10:33 PM