Windows 7 - Do not do upgrades!

There are countless reasons not to do an upgrade from a beta OS to a beta OS but people seem to think it's still ok.

I can't stress how bad upgrading these beta versions is. Stop doing it, or risk losing or corrupting our data.

Don't believe me, just ask "cw-kid" over at "thegreenbutton" having all his mp3's corrupted.

It probably didn't end there.

Just get a backup program like Acronis and do an image of your HD then restore from that.

Just for the record, I did a full restore in less than 2 hours. Most of that was just moving things back onto the HD from the image.

Yup I was bitten while upgrading from 7022 to 7048. Its best as you say to clean install. With Windows 7, so far installation has been pretty quick.

If you backup your c:\users\<account>\appdata folder to another partition or hd then you have all your program settings saved and you can just copy them back after install.

As well as "ProgramData"

yeah, good point, in some cases a few programs store their data in there. Ive no idea what criteria windows uses to choose which folder.

Basically those programs which are not installed for a particular user should use the ProgramData , but a lot of apps just stare to the AppData of each user - that's the way I understand it.


Back on topic
And now off to see if I can keep the run going on this machine and do another successful upgrade - I know it may go wrong but all previous have been fine, will then do fresh install tomorrow

From what I've seen so far, the corrupted music is a whole different story. It has to do with DRM, as some of my music didn't work on this comp, yet worked on my Fuze and on an XP comp.

yeah that makes sense

How anyone justifies doing an upgrade over a clean install is beyond me.

I guess they think its easier, when in actuallity it isnt. It causes all sorts of problems after install. This has been the way of things ever since win98.

Since this thread is about upgrading, this is a "newbie" question but here it goes....

Are we going to see new builds of the RC (besides maybe RC2) before the RTM? or is this it? Just wondering if I should "settle in" to the RC until the RTM comes out and I can buy it. Thanks in advance.