Win7... eventually

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So I finally bit the bullet and upgraded my primary desktop to Windows 7 last night:

About7.PNG

I had downloaded the RTM from Technet the day it became available, and had already upgraded my Thinkpad and done a fresh dual-boot installation on my desktop to check hardware compatibility, but I had been waiting for a Win7-compatible update to Norton Internet Security 2009 before upgrading my primary Vista partition,  The NIS update came through over the weekend, and there was no WoW guild raid tonight, so tonight it was.

The upgrade went very smoothly, though it took a whole lot longer than any other Windows upgrade I've ever done - over three hours from initially inserting the DVD to finally booting to my new Win7 desktop.  Apparently this time around it exports all your user customisations, programs, and settings, and then re-imports them all after it's performed the upgrade.  I guess that may help clear out a lot of old "dead wood" from the registry that would otherwise just get perpetuated, but damn it's slow.

Before actually performing the upgrade, the installer advised me of several programs that would potentially have (or cause) problems under Win7, and suggested I remove them beforehand.  It also flagged which ones I could safely reinstall after upgrading.  Most of them were old stuff that I no longer use anyway, but one was Backup Exec's admin client which I use to control BEX on my server.  I removed the old ones, but left the BEX client in place, figuring it probably only flagged it because it looks the same as a full BEX server installation.

After upgrading, sure enough, it won't let me run the BEX client:

BEXerror.PNG

Since BEX 11d is no longer current, I doubt that Symantec will be resolving that issue, so it looks like a perfect candidate for Win7's "Virtual XP Mode".  I'll tinker with that later in the week.

Thus far, everything else that I've tested is working perfectly.  It also feels a little faster, but that may well be the placebo effect.  But at this point I'm happy to give it a tentative thumbs up from the upgrade and compatibility standpoints, though the lengthy upgrade process is gonna cause some fallout, I'm sure.  I've no doubt it's directly related to the amount of crap I have installed - my lightly-loaded Thinkpad took only around 40 minutes from go to whoa - but man, over three hours is a killer!  I wonder how much places like Geek Squad are going to charge for doing the upgrade.





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This page contains a single entry by Jon published on August 25, 2009 11:26 PM.

The Kindle is dead! Long live the Kindle! was the previous entry in this blog.

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