Upgrading to Windows 7. Advice, warnings and suggestions thread.

[What Exit?]

I will soon be taking my laptop (work test bed and traveling machine) and upgrading it to Windows 7. I will report some notes and thoughts on it here. I have Win Vista on it now but plan on a clean install. There is nothing vital on the laptop and all I will probably do is copy off my favorites and docs.

Anyone already do a Win 7 upgrade/install?

If so please add your thoughts.

[tunaman]

My upgrade took almost two hours, and my box (while not new) ain't nothin' to sneeze at (x64 triple-core, 4GB RAM).

It might have taken longer had I not moved most of my data files (around 150GB of videos and music) to an external drive before the upgrade. According to several reports I've read, the more "stuff" that's on your drive, the longer the upgrade takes for some reason (Lifehacker even suggested that single-partition users temporarily split the drive into "OS" and "Data" partitions to make the upgrade complete faster).

So that's the main thing, really. This box had Vista Home Premium SP1 on it before the upgrade (factory HP install). The Win7 upgrade warned me that a couple of meaningless apps wouldn't work (Bejeweled is the only one I remember for some reason), but they worked any way.

[hatesfreedom]

umm. my installs worked fine. no problems. install windows 7, let it auto update all your drivers, done.

[pepperlandgirl]

I installed it last week. It took about 2-3 hours, but it was dead easy. I didn't do a clean install, and it didn't have any problems at all. It's as easy as hates said.

[What Exit?]

This is good news indeed. So a clean install should go great.

[Glazer]

My copy should be coming in the mail this week. I am busy backing up everything I don't want to lose just in case. I'm happy to hear that people are having an easy go of it. I'll let y'all know how it goes.