I just upgraded from 64 bit Vista to 64 bit Windows 7 RC build 7100. There's something fishy about my hard drive before I upgraded. Vista's CHKDSK wouldn't work. So I figured that since my drive is FUBAR anyways, I might as well do an in place upgrade and see what happens. So I backed up some important stuff to an external HDD and started the upgrade.
The upgrade was started at 3:30 and finished at 10:30 (keep in mind my computer is really messed up). If you are going to upgrade, please do a complete back-up before proceeding. I was very tempted to reboot my computer during the installation at some points (there was a single file that took 4 hours to process), which would have led to my computer being almost un-usable.
Corrupt files were found during installation. The new CHKDSK found and fixed some errors and bad clusters. My drive should be fine for a while longer, but I'll do a full back-up as soon as possible.
Windows 7 is pretty awesome so far. I don't like how tall the task bar is, but it looks great and its new features are nice. I had to re-install my nVidia driver to get Aero Glass working, but that's about it. I'll be running this OS until the release date, and then probably pay for the Ultimate edition since I really want the virtual machine and UNIX capabilities it offers.
EDIT: The virtual machine is really slow compared to Sun's VirtualBox, but Microsoft does give you Windows XP (as opposed to finding an installation disk yourself).
If you have about 10 spare GB left on your HDD, please consider making an EXT4 partition and installing Linux to it. It will become your best friend when something wrong happens to Windows. The Home Premium edition of Vista does not have the full system back up feature, and in my situation, any other back-up software would just crash anyways. Having the ability to make and restore an image made by NTFSCLONE is really nice right now.
Tags: Windows