Vista To 7 Upgrade Questions

asokas · 17 Nov 2009

Hi,

I am on Vista Home Premium at present. I bought the upgrade to Windows 7. I have two questions:

1) Is it true that when you upgrade from Vista to Windows 7, all of your installed programs basically remain intact and working, or do you have to re-install everything again from scratch? I believe that the documentation in the box said that if you are on XP, you would have to reinstall MS Office and some other programs. What is the situation in upgrading from Vista?

2) Partly in order to find out the answer to the above, I decided to upgrade my laptop first because it has relatively few installed programs on it compared to my PC. I tried on three separate occasions to do the upgrade. On each occasion, it went all the way through to the very end, completing all of the listed steps. However, it then stated that Windows 7 could NOT be installed on this computer and then unwound the entire thing, leaving me with Vista again.

Why, is a mystery to me because when I ran the Windows 7 Upgrade Advisor, it did not highlight any problems that would prevent the installation. Yes, it did point out one printer driver which might not work after the upgrade and advised me to uninstall it (which I did NOT do - might that be the problem?), but apart from that it seemed to be happy with the situation.

3) Do I really need a skilled technician to do this upgrade or can I not just do it all myself? If some major backup and re-installation of complex drivers is necessary, then maybe I need one. But is this really going to happen, or is the whole thing as self-explanatory as it seemed while doing it on my laptop?

Regards,

Asoka

Tews · 17 Nov 2009

Most people will tell you that a clean install is always better than an upgrade.... See Brinks tutorial on doing this -=> here

asokas · 17 Nov 2009

Hi,

Thank you. I'll take a look.

Yes, my technical guy told me that too. The thing is that it does not really work for me because it would take me literally weeks to reinstall all the many software programs that I have installed on the main PC. If I can do anything to avoid that, I will.

Asoka

Peregrine · 17 Nov 2009

I upgraded 3 computers to Win7 - 2 by upgrading from Vista and one as a clean install since it had WinXP. All three work fine now and there is no difference in operation of one over the other.

The upgrade process worked fine for both computers for the most part. I had to update my video card driver on one computer (but I had to do that with the clean install too) and on both computers I had to reinstall two printers - one actual printer and PDF Creator. PDF Creator was there after the upgrade it just didnt' work. Everything else just works: video editing software, photo editing software, Office 2003, and numerous other packages.

On the clean install the installation went smooth and fast although the video card didn't get picked up and I ended up with a generic VGA driver. I had to update that manually. I then had to reinstall all my programs and data. This whole endeavour took significantly longer than the upgrade process.

My own experience says go the upgrade route. In the end I got nice working systems that I'm pleased with. Neither route was glitch free and some manual fixing was required for all three computers.

If the upgrade doesn't work for whatever reason then I guess go the clean install route. If you're having trouble with your upgrade maybe you should follow the recommendation of upgrade advisor and remove your printer and re-install after the fact.

Cheers.

asokas · 17 Nov 2009

Hi Peregrine,

That's useful to know. Thank you.

Actually, even as I was typing that stuff about being advised to uninstall the printer driver but not doing so, I was wondering if I should indeed have done it. I shall give it a try in the morning.

It's certainly good to hear that the upgrade does not invalidate every installed program. Perhaps from what you are saying, the strategy should be to do the upgrade myself first and THEN get the technician to come and fix up the specific issues that remain, if I cannot do it myself. To get him to do the upgrade itself seems pointless since it takes hours and he will just be staring at the wall in that time while his bill runs up (unless he takes the PC away and does it on his premises).

Anyway, thank you for that. It helps.

Asoka