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#1
Seeking advice on Windows 7 setup
Greetings,
I am currently running Windows 7 64 bit on a 4 year old Dell desktop.
Originally this machine had Windows Vista. The Windows 7 upgrade disk/license I bought required me to install Windows 7 over Windows Vista. I was unable to do a clean install. I researched this quite extensively and contacted support and apparently this is true, there is no way around it. I would have to buy a full (non-upgrade) license in order to do a clean install.
My issue is this: My system takes a long time to boot, or I should say there is a ton of disk activity for a good 10 mins and this disk activity takes a big bite out of performance. So I basically boot-up, login and walk away for 10 mins. I can't really use the machine while it is booting and to add to it the disk drives tend to be really loud in this box (I've repalced the system drives several times over the years to increase capacity and all seem loud).
Once the system is fully booted and the disk activity dies the PC runs like a champ. I play current high demanding graphical video games with no issue (I did upgrade my video card not too long ago). So it's a managble problem it's just very annoying and from a techy perspective less than ideal.
My thinking is a clean install would improve this some what. I assume I have a lot of Vista crap left over (and as a techy I never trusted upgrading OS's, always have done clean installs). Additionally SSD are now a viable option for the OS drive. So ...
Will doing a clean Windows 7 install and using a SSD make a big difference? Is one more impactful than the other.
What about Windows 8? I don't care for the interface but if it can run my programs as well as Windows 7 and if I can get a clean install for cheaper woudl this be a better alternative?
It seems at a glance that a full license for Windows 7 has come down a bit in cost. but i also recall that Windows 8 is much cheaper.
FWIW I have on several occasions attempted to clean up/reduce the amount of start-up services and programs but it does not have much impact on the long boot times.