The slow climb to a new OS
Caveat emptor, or in the vernacular, “You pays your money and you takes your chances”. This time around, things are on my side. Back in June, I placed an advance order for Windows 7, at 50% off. Yesterday, my box with the fancy (single) rounded corner arrived, and the game began.
First of all, I did not “back up my hard drive”, because the compatibility guide showed that my installed software wouldn’t work. Ditto for a list of other programs, so the first job was to uninstall the grocery list. Surprisingly, Logitech camera drivers were the hardest to remove, and I spent my first couple of hours simply following the remove-reboot-continue ritual. Goodbye, PGP, as well.
With the computer plugged in to both external power and network, I said a prayer and launched the “Setup” routine. Note that this was a safe upgrade path, from Vista to W7, but nothing in the world of operating systems is without risk. Given my past experience with installation of XP or Linux, I allotted a couple of hours to the job. Here’s the real story.
After 13 hours (that’s not a typo), my laptop rebooted for the n-th time with a prompt to log in. All accounts were conserved, and my desktop looked “right”, that is, covered with far too many icons for effective use. We’re now three hours into my new OS, and everything works. Including, I have to add, a DOS based genealogy package that I’ve been shepherding around since 1997. Pretty impressive backward compatibility.
My Linux boot sector was scrubbed, but that’s “normal” with Microsoft; I have a script that I run from a bootable USB drive and things were back to dual-boot harmony in minutes. This is the first time I’ve used an off the shelf Windows product in over a decade, what with new machines coming preinstalled. I’m willing to recommend the upgrade path to others, as long as they have the patience of Job. Thirteen hours?
