Why Upgrade?
Personally, why should I? I've been to a sales rally of Microsoft products and they introduced several advancements of Windows 7. Positively I'm impressed with those features, the new Taskbar, Gadgets, Aero Shake, Aero Snap, Aero Peak, HomeGroup, and the Jump Lists. To view all Windows 7 features go here. But my curiosity still thirst for more, so I googled, they say Windows 7 boots faster, and better memory management according to this video and while browsing, I came across a site, which I could no longer remember, with a slogan "all the good things of Vista and the speed of XP". Sounds promising, but to see is to believe. Why this early? There's no perfect software, it might have a handful of bugs at this point in time. Umm, maybe not that much, look at what Vista and XP had gone through - at least in my own opinion - and the fact that my Vista is getting slower everyday, I want to get out of it, now I have an option than downgrading to XP.
Will My Existing Programs Run After The Upgrade?
Since I'm a programmer, I'm more concerned with the development tools like SQL Server, Visual Studio, and third party development softwares installed in my laptop. Several things I've found on some forums were SQL Server and Visual Studio 2008 fails during installation, and for everything else, I only found just a handful of incompatibilities, but I can live through it. Anyways, I will mention later in this article the applications that I will find incompatible with Windows 7.
My First Steps
I started with downloading Microsofts' Windows 7 Upgrade Advisor from here to know if my laptop is capable of running Windows 7.
I wasn't able to catch a screenshot of my results.
It presented me three sections such as system requirements, the hardware devices, and the programs installed. Like the one below, it's just an example, it's not mine:
Basically, it will advise you what to do when it finds a program that might cause a problem, or a device that needs a driver update. Since Windows 7 supports a larger number of devices than Vista, the advisor will just recommend a Windows Update, no need to go to your device manufacturer's site.
As for my devices, well, I could say, "bada bing, bada boom!"
So what the heck am I waiting for?
On The Road To Upgrading
I've selected x86, of course, my unit is not 64-bit.
See the link Help Me Decide on the screenshot below?
Though I got enough room for the upgrade, I was wondering if the 16 GB space requirement for Windows 7 will add up to my consumed space, or half of it, since I'm upgrading only. So, I took a screenshot of my hard disk space...
and I'll find out later how compact will Windows 7 be.
Moving on...
You won't need these extras with Windows 7, they are already built in to the system, except for DreamScene, Microsoft Tinker, and Hold'Em Poker. I can't find the DreamScene folder in my system after the upgrade. However, in some forums, they said that DreamScene can be installed separately.
I never updated my SCSI/Raid Host Controllers and I never uninstalled the programs before the upgrade as advised above. However, I can still run SQL Server 2008, VS 2003, and Visual Studio 6, except for MS JVM which is already gone in my system. I uninstalled my Bluetooth Stack after the upgrade, because my Bluetooth was not functioning, but just right after removing it, Windows 7 automatically installed its drivers...
and I can transfer data over my Bluetooth perfectly.
The main upgrade process took 6 hours.
Including these Windows Updates that Windows Action Center advised me to perform:
Afterwards, I checked my drive space and surprisingly I gained about 12 GB more free space...
Initial Conclusion:
Well, it's been three days now, and I'm still exploring Windows 7. Here are some of my initial observations:
- It, indeed, boots a lot faster.
- Applications open up a lot faster as well as switching between games and the desktop.
- As compared to my memory consumption in Vista, where it eats up to about 80% of my memory even when Firefox is the only active application, now, it's only at about 50%.
- More to come...
Here are the applications that are still working after the upgrade:
- Adobe Dreamweaver CS3
- Adobe Photoshop CS3
- AVG 8.5
- Firefox
- JetAudio 7
- MS Office 2003
- MS SQL 2005
- MS SQL 2008
- MS VSS 2005
- Opera 9
- SnagIt 9
- Sony Acid Pro 7
- Sony Vegas Movie Studio Platinum 9
- SpongeBob SquarePants Diner Dash
- Super v2009 Build 35
- Yahoo Messenger 9
- uTorrent
- Winamp 5.531
- More to come...
Here are the applications that crashed:
- RedGate Software (crashes at loading)
- Daemon Tools Pro
- More to come...
That's it for now. So far, Windows 7 performed well. I love it, in fact, I even made two wallpapers for my laptop, and I want to share it with you:
