There is a pop­u­lar, and per­haps even fac­tual adage, which goes like this:

“Never upgrade a Win­dows product; always do a fresh install”

Today I put that to the test.  I have been Installing and con­fig­ur­ing Win­dows since the days of 3.1. My first expos­ure to the product range was Win­dows 2, which my father had on his PC.  My first pro­fes­sional expos­ure was the task of migrat­ing 3.1 to Win­dows 95 at Span­dex Plc in Bris­tol, way back when I was only a 14 year old IT intern. Since then I have developed a career in IT and now, at 32, have a Chartered IT Pro­fes­sional award from the Brit­ish Com­puter Soci­ety. I say this, because it is import­ant that my back­ground and know­ledge level is clear.

This is as much a guide as any­thing else, so in that spirit here is what you need to do to upgrade from Win­dows Vista Home Premium to Win­dows 7 Home Premium.

Things to consider.

1. If your ori­ginal com­puter came with Vista.  That is, it either had it installed when you bought it, or has a “Ready for Vista” sticker on it. This means that Microsoft knows about your machine and it reaches the stand­ards they set for their soft­ware.  Half the battle here, and half the errors in pre­vi­ous upgrades, would have been due to non stand­ard equip­ment that con­fuses the upgrade.

2. Which ver­sion of Win­dows 7 you want to go to. There are numer­ous charts on the Net about this, but essen­tially I am keep­ing this easy and going from Premium to Premium.  I am doing this because Pro­fes­sional is over twice the price, and I am going to try and see if I need it before I go for it.

3. The price of the soft­ware. As usual, and much lam­pooned, Microsoft have pro­duced some­thing like twenty ver­sions of this product. I have gone for the Premium Upgrade pack­age, which i bought, in all places, at Tesco’s super­mar­ket. This was £56 and a quick price check via the red eye app on my iPhone told me that this was a good price.

Things you need.

1. Your upgrade DVD

2. Your laptop

3. A port­able hard drive

4. A large glass of wine

Now, one of those, you may think, is not an actual require­ment to upgrade Vista to Win­dows 7. All I can say is, “You obvi­ously haven’t done this before”. Upgrad­ing is going to take ages. Ages. There will be moments in the upgrade when you won­der if it has crashed, if it ever going to fin­ish. It will prob­ably look stuck on some­thing at least once; end­lessly rumin­at­ing at a low percentage.

This is all nor­mal.  If you do the upgrade while stressed, high on cof­fee, arguing with your wife or in a hurry: then you will fail.

For me, a nice glass of wine, sup­per on the way and a long Sunday after­noon; that long dark teatime of the soul, is com­pletely relax­ing and the upgrade will not and can­not stress me out.

Even an pro­fes­sional IT per­son is prey for his emo­tions. I once saw a guy kick a £250,000 server because it failed a backup. Failed a backup. As in, it was not backed up and he was kick­ing it! Ser­i­ously, pray heed my advice and whatever your poison is; take a wee drop to relax.

Frankly, if my PC were water­proof, I would do these things in a warm bath with Cesca mas­sa­ging my back!

Here we go.

1. Scan your com­puter with your anti virus.

Do this overnight the day before as this takes ages.

2. Defrag­ment your com­puter. (Time = 16:00)

These two steps are vital. a frag­men­ted com­puter will pos­sibly triple the upgrade time. Mine is not usu­ally frag­men­ted, but this could take a while itself.

3. Unin­stall everything you don’t need. (Time = 16:31)

It is vital that you go through your com­puter and remove all the junk you have installed over the months you have been stuck with Vista. It is espe­cially import­ant to remove any­thing that inter­acts with the desktop. So Rocket Dock, Google Chat, etc. Plus all the little applic­a­tions that sit in the bot­tom right (by the clock), any­thing that isn’t made by Microsoft, came with a major product or came with the machine should be removed. I also unin­stalled my fire­wall as I am sure that it is not going to be com­pat­ible. Since my Anti Virus is a free one, I unin­stalled that too.

4. Backup your doc­u­ments. (Time = 16:51)

Back­ing up is some­thing we all should do more of. Now is the time to copy off your import­ant doc­u­ments, pho­tos and pic­tures. If the install fails, you prob­ably wont lose them, but just in case and you should be doing it anyway.

5. Check your disk space. (Time = 18:10)

You need lots of free space to install Win­dows 7. There is an offi­cial num­ber, but on a laptop; the more the bet­ter. This is due to the RAM disk the upgrade will (prob­ably) cre­ate, the more space that there is for this, the less likely your are to have problems.

6. Finally, you can start. Put in the DVD. (Time = 18:12)

7. The prob­lems screen. (Time = 18:15)

Half way through the options I got this screen.  These are applic­a­tions not com­pat­ible with Win­dows 7, or may screw the upgrade. Notice that iTunes is here. I quit the upgrade and removed all of these apps. I can always put  them back when I finish.

8. Restart the upgrade. (Time = 18:26)

8. The final res­ult. (Time = 20:57)

As pre­dicted, I did have a screen where the sys­tem sat on 38% for an hour and then jumped to 80%. This is clas­sic Microsoft and noth­ing to worry about. The sys­tem also restar­ted about 3 times. When this hap­pens do not touch any­thing. Dont press any­thing, don’t answer any mes­sage that pops up sug­gest­ing “press but­ton to boot from CD” or “Chose oper­at­ing sys­tem to load”. The upgrade will make all the choices; let it.

Wait.

Finally, you are asked for your Product Key, this is prob­ably attached to the inside of the box, under the ‘manual’,

So, I am now on Win­dows 7!  Great, and it only took 5 hours. You notice that I did all this without Inter­net access (I have none at home), and when I get to a café later, I will do the online regis­tra­tion and patching.

Have I had any prob­lems since upgrad­ing? Only one. When my machine starts I get some sort of Intel error pop up. This is prob­ably going to be sor­ted later today when I update via the internet.

Over­all, the upgrade was the most pain­less I have ever encountered. I would go so far as to say that it was easy. At one point I was show­ing my wife the install going and acci­dent­ally ejec­ted the DVD!  Upon put­ting it back in, the sys­tem car­ried on flaw­lessly. Phew.

Does this mean that Microsoft have changed? Only time will tell. But, as a new Win­dows 7 user, I can say that I am very happy!

Regards,

Basho

Items used in this post:

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