Upgrading From Windows Vista to Windows 7
Friday, June 26, 2009 at 2:44PM 
My lovely wife, Tara, has a Toshiba laptop that she has owned for the past year. Being about a year old, it's a Vista Home Premium roll-out machine. She enjoys the benefits of the 64-bit Vista Home Premium install, the dual-core AMD Turion X2, ATI Radeon integrated graphics, etc.
She is also one of the few who enjoys using Vista. She likes the interface, the add-ons, and the ways that things are placed. It just seems to make sense. She isn't one of the crazy, anti-progress hermits who insist on running Windows XP Professional 32-bit on a Quad-Core processor with 2 gigabytes of RAM (because that's all it can utilize).
I digress.
Her only complaint has been her boot times (which are atrocious). I had been threatening her with Windows 7 since the Public Beta was released. She has been listening to different podcasts with me, and has been a little more receptive of my badgering.
Insert Windows 7 Release Candidate
Last night I downloaded the ISO of the 64-bit version of the Windows 7 Release Candidate, and have been attempting to install if for the last couple of hours. The installation has been going relatively flawlessly until this last part. The hard drive seems to be working on something (as the light is intermittently blinking, as normal). The problem is, it has been stuck at 42 percent on the "Transferring files, settings, and programs" part. It doesn't seem to be frozen, it just hasn't moved in the last half hour. I really hope nothing is broken.
Raymond Mendoza
About an hour and a half after my last post, we are now stuck at 60 percent. UGH! At least is isn't broken :)
Raymond Mendoza
After the first restart (at 62% complete), it's back to "Transferring files, settings, and programs." We are officially at 70% finished.
Raymond Mendoza
Wow, it is now 11:09PM and I have successfully finished the Windows 7 upgrade. Now, there were a few gotchas and caveats that I will explain.
I started this mess at about 4:00PM. It was completed at about 8:15PM. That's over four hours! Then I did a disk clean-up to remove all of the Windows Installation files and old System Restore backups. I then ran the defragmenter. It did 5 PASSES! It was finally finished at around 11:00PM (around 2.5 hours just for defragmenting).
Overall, there are many improvements. The boot up time is cut to less than half of what it was. I don't think Tara is going to be able to make breakfast while it's booting, anymore. The biggest change I noticed was the time going from login to useable desktop. That took about a minute! The menus and such are more responsive. The completely noticeable lag time is non-existent.
Now, I am not the main user of this machine, so it will be up to her to update me on the progress and changes (which I will report back at a later date).
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Reader Comments (2)
Wow 4hours I hope all is working well..I have roughly the same specs on a HP dv6000 laptop....I went from vista which i also found very good to Win 7 RC1 which is much more snappier and after 4 months of using beta and the rc release am still finding out new features...Anyways i have installed win 7 rc 1 over 20 different machines (3 in my own house) and never took over 35 to 45 minutes to install.....What we did was clean installs never inplace install...Too many issues that could arise ,.We run Windows Easy transfer to get all data and settings than after new clean install transfer back and install apps....Anyways it is a awesome Operating system .....Hope the wife likes it, that what really counts.
Take Care
Thank you for your comment! My wife has been enjoying it so far. She is also constantly finding new things that she likes. I told her I would like to make write a new post, on friday, covering some of her likes and dislikes, so she is mentally collecting them for me.
I would have loved to do a clean install, but I had recently done a fresh install of Vista for her (to combat a finicky wireless card), and I figured it was going to go smoothly. I guess that was an error on my part. She seems to be enjoying it, nonetheless.