An Old School Geek’s approach to Installing & Setting Up a Windows PC

I had to update my 11 year old HW (don't laugh, I made it last from Win95 through XP) finally due to the end of support for XP and knowing that the motherboard would not support Win7 64 bit. I found this tutorial and studied it and all the supporting links, since I had never tried audit mode before.

It ended up taking a couple of days to do the install, partly due to a flaky graphics card and partly due to installation issues. One of the problems I had was the long green progress bar when viewing directories, even after I tried all the fixes. The other was that I had problems installing my antivirus (Norton Security Suite, free from ISP), so I installed another temporarily. The big success was getting my user files on my HDD while all the boot and system files are on the SSD, however, the users that I added did not show up on my login screen, so I ended up adding them after my initial OOBE boot.

After running through this process, I think one of the issues I ran into was that the Windows update was near the end of the task list, rather than one of the first things. All of my install and delay issues were non-existent once I ran the updates and went through the OOBE startup. I think the order in this tutorial of Kari's would have worked better for me, since the updates are done prior to the SW installs.

All in all, I learned a lot, got everything up and running, all emails and files are transferred, initial backup complete (need to do another one now that I have everything installed that I want). I decided that I should join the forums to at least comment on my experience, and thank everyone who contributes. I expect this one to last another decade (with regular SW updates and maintenance, of course).

You have a great tutorial here, which i would like to use. I am trying to install window 7 on my old PC (10 years). I am using a 32 bit installation disk and everything seems to go fine, but it does not see my other hard drive. I force it to see the other drive, but if I reboot it does not see the other drive until I force it. Anybody have any ideas?!

Hi, I have started another thread, 'Installing Windows 7 on an old computerI am trying to install window 7'.

Unfornunately your suggestion didn't help. But thanks anyway.

I wonder if this same install method will work on Windows 10. I would like to fresh install 10, but i like my stuff and settings on another drive.

Just read through the article and it's great, just getting ready to do an re-install of Windows 7 (and maybe update to 10). The re-install was necessary afetr I got a screwed up system that said it ws no longer genuine, despite several hours of work by MS Tech Support and the great users here.

The last time I re-installed, I did move the default user file to a seperate drive, but I wasn't diligent in making an image, my bad. I did however backup all user files the night before the problem occured .

During the trouble shooting sessions with MS they attempted to "repair" using the install disk and here's where there might be a downside to having the default user profiles on another disk. The repair caused an error that said something along the line " to attempt repair windows nneds to have user profiles on same partition/drive" Not the exact words but close enough. The Tech was surprised I had done this and didn't know how to proceed other than a total re-install. I thanked him and went on my way.

Has anyone run into this before?