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).
