Doing software development it is essential that your product works on systems customers want to use. This means keeping upto date with standard updates and a few years ago I purchased a Vista system. It did thrown up a few compatibility problems so the purchase was worth while, but somehow the system never worked very well. The PC was a reasonable spec, Core Duo, 2.4GHz with 2GB or RAM.
However, enough has been enough, and my Windows 7 systems seem very stable, so I decided it was time to update the Vista to Windows 7 - 32bit. A search on Amazon brought up a reasonable price, and then a few more GBs or RAM to go to 4GB. The fitting of RAM was easy, though of course, 32 bit Windows only sees 3GBs.
In theory, Vista can be updated to Windows and keep the system intact. Obviously a full backup was done first, and the install was started. At this point a problem arose. The new Windows 7 package was less high end than the original Vista package, and this would not allow for a seamless upgrade. The notes implied that all data would be lost, and a clean install would be carried out. The truth was actually not quiet so bad. On starting the update, about 50GB of files were backed up to a windows.old directory, and this contained all programs and user directory. Obviously the programs are not installed, but copies are made. Unexpectedly, the rest of the hard drive was left unchanged, so all existing directories were left as original. I now just need to clear down a lot of the unwanted 50GB backup.
Overall, the upgrade was very painless and after a bit of personal tweaking, I now have a nice Windows 7 machine which seems to work.
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