Windows 7 In Place Upgrade—or—That Was Easy!

Last Tuesday I was fortunate to receive an Enterprise Windows 7 Ultimate 64 bit Upgrade Disk through my school system. So—-after contemplating a clean install and literally the 20+ hours I estimated I would need to completely redo my system from scratch, I decided what the heck—-let’s give the in-place upgrade a try since it actually installs a clean system—-then migrates settings and applications instead of modifying existing system files. I had done some prior research and one article in particular from Extreme Tech showed absolutely no performance differences between a clean install and an in-place upgrade.

So I bit the bullet and did the upgrade using the in-place method. I was upgrading from Vista Ultimate 64 Bit SP2

Holy Smoly—–to paraphrase the Staples commercial ….. “That Was Easy"

Easiest upgrade I have ever performed—–total time took 2 ½ hours including prep and my machine was TOTALLY useable with all apps and drivers migrated over.

Procedures:

I downloaded and ran the Win 7 Upgrade Advisor which strangely is still in Beta. It identified one program which I never use anyway—-so I removed it. Now here’s where I should have remembered something—-but didn’t—-the wonderful thing is that the upgrade process is so stable—I had zero issues….. My i7 920 is overclocked to 3.5Ghz and I totally forgot to set it back to defaults while running the upgrade! So I did the entire upgrade while overclocked! It worked like a champ—-but I would NOT recommend doing that at all….. I also did not shut off my AVG Free AntiVirus program but have read various sources that recommend you shut off any AV program before upgrading.

It is important to be connected to the Internet during the entire update process. I just slipped in the Win 7 Upgrade Disk while the computer was already booted into Vista. I did NOT have to boot up from the DVD. The computer found the upgrade disk and opened it—–and from there the process started.

After I selected “Upgrade” the install routine downloaded some updates—-and then checked my entire system AGAIN for any possible problems. This time it identified some old Windows Mobile Synchronization drivers as a culprit (drivers from Microsoft no less)—-and also—strangely—-the latest ATI video card drivers I had installed—-lastly—-it identified some of the Asus software I had installed with my P6T Deluxe Mobo : PC Probe, Turbo V, etc. and also recommended I uninstall iTunes and reinstall it AFTER the upgrade. It stopped the install process and recommended I remove this software. I did—-except the old Windows Mobile software was no longer on my machine (or at least I thought)—-WRONG—-the uninstalled device drivers were still present and I had to go through the “show_non-present_devices” routine in the CMD prompt to show them—-so I could actually uninstall them from the device manager. The routine below will help you do that if you run into this:

Open up a Command Prompt window and type:

set devmgr_show_nonpresent_devices=1 <enter>

start devmgmt.msc <enter>

You must keep this Command window open while you look in Device Manager, because once the session is closed the setting will be lost. In Device Manager, on the View menu, check Show Hidden Devices. You should now be able to see any extra entries or grayed-out "ghosts" of hardware that is installed but not currently connected to the computer.

After finally removing everything recommended—-I started the upgrade process again—-and this time it ran without hitch—-all the way through——took about an hour and a half on a machine with a 1TB RAID 0 setup with about 400 gigs of programs, files and data.

The machine rebooted—asked me a couple questions—-validated my program key and Viola!!! Done. I couldn’t believe it! I did have a little error pop up about a .sys file not loading that I quickly found was another of the Asus software programs that I had not removed “EPU-6”. I uninstalled it, rebooted and the error was gone.

Only thing left was to pick a Desktop “Theme” set a few settings and re-enable the Quick Launch Toolbar which has been disabled in Win 7. Why did they disable it—-who knows—-but it can easily be re-enbled by doing this: Bring The Quick Launch Toolbar Back In Windows 7 ~ Windows Fanatics

I reinstalled the ATI video Card drivers and iTunes 9, finished any more personalization and started checking my applications. NO PROBLEMS!

I checked all my connections with Exchange Server and Outlook 2007 and SharePoint. NO PROBLEMS!

All my video editing stuff worked. NO PROBLEMS!

iTunes 9 synchs with my new iPhone. NO PROBLEMS!

It connects and backs up to my Windows Home Server. NO PROBLEMS!

It connects and streams media from Media Center to the built in Media Center Extender in my HP MediaSmart Hi Def TV. NO PROBLEMS!

I did a “Windows Update” and it recommended a new ATI Driver and a new Soundblaster X-Fi Titanium driver. I did both—-only to find that they are NOT the latest recommended drivers for Win 7—-so I uninstalled them and reinstalled with the latest from ATI and Creative—–the ones I ALREADY had on my machine in the first place. I recommend that if you KNOW your driver is newer—-ignore the Windows Update recommendations for those two….

I then did a Disk Cleanup and a Disk Defragmentation. I had read that this was performed automatically but that was not the case for me. I do believe that these two steps should be essential as Disk Cleanup identified about two gigs of “Old System Files” that could be removed. I checked everything in Disk Cleanup—-and ran it——with a Defrag shortly after……

Finally—-I downloaded the latest version of CCleaner and ran it—-with the registry cleaning portion as well…

It has been 4 days now of decent use and I have had ZERO problems—-and ZERO crashes. My system is snappy as heck (but it was snappy as heck with Vista Ultimate 64 as well). It boots in half the time though—-which is a nice improvement.

I am so impressed by this upgrade process that I am going to upgrade my son’s machines and my wife’s machine as well as my laptop with “Upgrades” vice a clean install.

If you have the time—-or you are building a new machine—-or moving up from XP—-sure—–a clean install is the ONLY way to go. But if you just want to get your family to Win 7 as painlessly as possible—-without losing anything and without a bunch of work—-the Upgrade in Place process is recommended.

Now—-whether you NEED to upgrade to Win 7 from Vista SP2…..

Well, that’s a topic for another discussion….