Windows 7 Upgrade a Success

We recall sitting on the floor in 1995 and struggling to figure out how to complete our horrifying upgrade to Windows 95. It was not a happy day.

This latest experience - upgrading from Vista to Windows 7 - was much better. The whole process took about four hours. The "advisor" told us to uninstall iTunes - which we had to do before it would let us continue. The actual chugging of the program went on unattended for about three hours. After that things looked pretty good. Trend Micro did not work. It took a while until we found the right upgrade on their site. Norton Ghost did not work at first. Now it does - we think we upgraded it. Our HAVA remote TV system refused to operate. We actually called human support for that and went through a barrage of firewall settings. Then after a reboot, even that started working.

The best surprise was the Windows Media center. We have a TV card in the computer and it asked if we want Windows to configure it. Wc clicked on the 'Sure, why not' button? Windows took the liberty of deciding to look for the digital HD Clear Qam channels that our cable operator sends us - instead of configuring the normal non-digital cable channels that we had before. So we were surprised to find 23 channels in HD after the config concluded. Really eye-popping quality.

As to the actual features of the operating system - we never had that much difficulty with Vista - maybe one of the few fans of the system. 7 is faster booting and has more eye candy than Vista. For an XP user, the difference will be striking in a good way. We are still finding nice surprises and we are certain that there are some not so nice ones lurking. But all told, this was a good run.

Next experiment. We are hoping to take our 10 inch Dell 10V netbook ($250) and make it into a Hackintosh with the help of our number two son and mac expert.