Stronski.org

So Windows 7 has been officially released and I’m waiting for Amazon.ca to get their butts in gear and get my copy of Windows 7 Professional shipped. I actually paid for it months ago during the half-price pre-order promotion that Microsoft put on. I’m starting to get a bit impatient.

In the meantime I have started to get ready to install Windows 7. I’m currently running Windows Vista and this particular installation is about 2 years old. That actually says something good about Windows Vista versus Windows XP. Despite all the people that moan about what a terrible OS Vista is, I never managed to go much longer than 6 months without needing to format and re-install Windows XP. That is perhaps a bit more often than the average user but I use a lot of different applications and it seems like I’m always updating or upgrading one of them. And of course every time that happens it’s an opportunity for something to screw up. But enough about Vista and XP. I’m looking to the future here!

And part of that looking forward requires doing the necessary chores before a clean install. All my personal data needs to be backed up. This is made a bit easier by using one partition on one drive for my windows installation. This is kind of a throwback to the bad old days when windows had trouble with large partitions and it’s also partly to make it easier to reformat. I just need to back up any data on my C: drive to another partition or hard drive and I don’t need to bother with anything that is already out of the c: partition.

Another thing that’s needed is to download Windows 7 drivers for my hardware and to organize various discs and installation files to reinstall my applications. This is a very important step and if you forget it you will be much delayed in enjoying your new OS.