windows 7.... what a effing joke

[TheDon]

I took the dive off a cliff into a pit of sharp knives and salt and did the upgrade. Boy does it continue to be painful.

A friend hooked me up with a copy of 7 ultimate with his developers license or w/e it is. So I go to upgrade from vista to 7... you think that shit would be easy.. Wrong. It hung up on the last step at 43% for 18 hours... yeah. I just left it since ya know, it might get back on track.

So I had to power down manually and restart.. what do I get.. blue screen.... I try to roll back to vista but its a no go.. more blue screen, yelling and cursing micrsoft and bill gates.

At one point I almost said fuck it and threw the laptop under the wheels of my car on my way to UCF to go pick up a macbook pro at student price.

So I had to do a clean install of 7, well somewhat. I had to do a systems repair which took 6 hours, that fixed moved onto install 7. All the old files from vista supposedly went to windows.old... They in fact did not. So I lost some 40 gigs of photos, and 15 gigs of music. Great eh?


Now im running 7 on a crutch, need all the drivers, all of my photography software, cs4 included, photomatix pro, microsoft office , etc etc..

not only that I have a project due in class on the 2nd. Thank god I emailed it to myself and have it on my thumb drive and my photography project... should be on my camera still..



Yeah yeah I know back up, etc. Well my friend supposedly cloned the drive and stuck it in a cloud storage system... I come to find out that failed...

seriously, I did not need this shit to go down this week

[Ozzie]

Youch, sorry to hear about all the troubles.

I recommend(ed) it because my experience was much less troublesome.

For reference:
Bought Win7 professional Upgrade.
Am using a 4-5 year old computer.
Was running XP with all service packs, and "only" 2GB of RAM.
Bought a new hard drive with 7
Installed new drive and designated it as C: the drive to boot from (previous boot drive with all my data, with some basic backups, became my D: drive).
Due to old computer, I cannot use 64 bit Win7, so installed 32 bit version.
Put Win7 upgrade cd and chose "Custom Installation".
It somehow found XP on D: because it proceeded to format and install on the new C: drive.
After the installation, it did not find my motherboard's sound card and network drivers - but it used some other network driver. All other drivers (mouse, keyboard, old SGI monitor, old ATI graphic cards) were found on the basic installation.
I then got on the Internet, checked for updates, and it found the correct drivers.
Copied the "My Documents" from my old drive (now D, to the new installation drive C:
All my old XP office programs are working fine.
Can't really think of any other older program that has given me any trouble.
>>> I do think that a 64 bit installation may be a fussier upgrade, because that required certain programs and drivers to be recompiled to work. <<<

The whole process, including formating the drive probably took 30 minutes, and unlike XP, I didn't have to enter a lot of information prior to the set up. A few choices and walked away, came back and Win7 was running. I suppose installing on top of Vista is a whole different process, and perhaps that is the differences that you experienced.

Am not a Windows fan boy, just sharing my experience. It's been a few weeks now, and the computer still turns on, and off, and responds quicker than with XP, but again that is the main benefit of a clean install.

[tyb323]

i just recently got windows 7, installed it on a partition of my mac. I never had vista, so for me, i can only notice aesthetic differences between it an xp tbh

[DeCobra]

What kind of laptop do you have? What are the specs?

Highly unlikely that your files were deleted.

I am wondering if the copy of Win7 you got is a final release build. Can you tell me what build version you got?

Originally Posted by TheDon

I took the dive off a cliff into a pit of sharp knives and salt and did the upgrade. Boy does it continue to be painful.

A friend hooked me up with a copy of 7 ultimate with his developers license or w/e it is. So I go to upgrade from vista to 7... you think that shit would be easy.. Wrong. It hung up on the last step at 43% for 18 hours... yeah. I just left it since ya know, it might get back on track.

So I had to power down manually and restart.. what do I get.. blue screen.... I try to roll back to vista but its a no go.. more blue screen, yelling and cursing micrsoft and bill gates.

At one point I almost said fuck it and threw the laptop under the wheels of my car on my way to UCF to go pick up a macbook pro at student price.

So I had to do a clean install of 7, well somewhat. I had to do a systems repair which took 6 hours, that fixed moved onto install 7. All the old files from vista supposedly went to windows.old... They in fact did not. So I lost some 40 gigs of photos, and 15 gigs of music. Great eh?


Now im running 7 on a crutch, need all the drivers, all of my photography software, cs4 included, photomatix pro, microsoft office , etc etc..

not only that I have a project due in class on the 2nd. Thank god I emailed it to myself and have it on my thumb drive and my photography project... should be on my camera still..



Yeah yeah I know back up, etc. Well my friend supposedly cloned the drive and stuck it in a cloud storage system... I come to find out that failed...

seriously, I did not need this shit to go down this week

[TheDon]

dell inspiron 1525.. 2 gig ram 250 gig harddrive dual core intel, etc.


all of my old stuff went to windows.old. but pics and music is not showing up

[mauibarber]

I bought an aluminum iMac about 6 months ago. Its the best computer I have ever owned. I never understood why mac people were such weirdos. Now I get it. I hope to never have to own a windows machine ever again.

Its like mowing a lawn with a push mower your whole life then somebody introduces you to a rider mower. There is no going back.

[Sidaries]

I used Xp 32 bit before, than upgraded to Windows 7 64-bit. Well it was a clean install, I never believed in upgrades. It took about 1 hour and it works fine from that time. Until now I did not have any compatibility issues, only one problem. It was quite difficult to move my mails from Outlook Express to the new Windows Mail. It took many hours searching on the internet to do it. Otherwise it seems good to me.

[TheSmokingMan]

I always do a clean install when upgrading the operating system. It's a good idea to wait 6 months or so after a new operating system comes out so all of the hardware manufacturers have time to update their drivers, otherwise you might end up out in the cold for a few devices. I would also recommend you get an external hard drive to keep your files backed up. That way, if anything like this does happen again, it won't be so frustrating.

[jackb]

Originally Posted by mauibarber

I bought an aluminum iMac about 6 months ago. Its the best computer I have ever owned. I never understood why mac people were such weirdos. Now I get it. I hope to never have to own a windows machine ever again.

Its like mowing a lawn with a push mower your whole life then somebody introduces you to a rider mower. There is no going back.

That's a great analogy, I'm going to use it next time I'm describing how much better OSX is than windows. I made the switch to a macbook pro a few months ago- My only regret is I didn't do it 18 years ago.

[EdR5150]

I always try to do clean installs. It's a chance to leave any problems your previous OS had behind, and start fresh with a clean file system, registry, etc. I have a Vista machine at work that I was able to add another drive so I could dual boot between Win7 and Vista.

I have at least two hard drives, or two partitions on all my machines - one for the OS, and one for personal files, I even change the path of the desktop, docs, pics, videos, etc so they store the files on the second logical drive. That way if my OS ever gets corrupted, I can wipe the drive, start over, and not lose much.

I realize if you use a notebook, it's much harder to use my recommendations. I primarly use my notebook for web browsing, and remote connecting to other machines. Not much gets stored on my notebook, and I try to transfer files I generate to my desktop. If the notebook goes down, I don't lose much there either.

~Eddie, MCDST, MCSA, going for MCITP: Enterprise Administrator