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#1
Win 7 Pre-Installation Advice please
Hi Folks,
New to the forums and frantically reading the millions of threads and posts. Overwhelming! However I have some questions which are more 'what would you do/advise' oriented before I get stuck in at the weekend.
Current System info (that matters):
Vista Home Premium x64
C: Vista Installed here (300gb) - no more partitions. 200 gb free.
D: Data drive (1TB) - mainly games, photos, vids
Ok so my new Win 7 software arrived today (Home Premium full retail) - here are my goals:
Get Win 7 installed whilst still being able to boot to Vista
Once Im happy - its bye bye Vista - I have no desire to dual boot these two
However I have several options to achieve this and here is where your advice is required:
a) Shrink my Vista partition on C:\ and install Win 7 here
b) Partition my D:\ and install Win 7 here
c) By a 3rd HDD (im tempted) and Install Win 7 here.
I want the easiest solution possible. Ive heard shrinking a vista partition can yield a really poor shrink due to immovable data, pagefile etc and the work involved in getting a good shrink is probably beyond my abilities (and patience).
if I but a new HDD and whack Win 7 on that....i see two more options:
1) Vista is aware of what I do
2) I unplug the Vista Drive and install Win 7 on the new drive and use Bios to choose which drive I boot from rather than using a boot manager...now some of you are probably sniggering about now cos I just reached the very edge of my understanding....
So perhaps I should hand over to you and your advice. just remember that once Win 7 is up and running and everything is stable - i dont want Vista anymore and I WILL want to reclaim my 300 Gb C: to use elsewhere (media server/NAS) and as such I dont want Win 7 falling over when I pull the plug/format it. Im sure easyBCD is going to get mentioned.
Anyhow...what do you far more experienced folks think?
Matt