A Slllooowww Windows 7 Upgrade

I took my own recent advice and bought a copy of the Windows 7 Family Pack for my home. To recap, it's a $149.99 copy of Windows 7 Home Premium with three licenses, allowing you to install it on up to three computers. I then spent one long, frustrating weekend installing it on my kids' computer.

My kids' PC is an HP desktop that had 64-bit Windows Vista and 3GB RAM. I decided to do an upgrade, rather than a clean install. An upgrade is when you install the new OS over the old one -- in this case, replacing Vista with Windows 7. It leaves all your programs and data in place. In a clean install, the hard drive is wiped clean, including all programs and data, and the OS is installed on the hard drive. (Note that if you try to move from Windows XP to Windows 7, you must do a clean install -- you can't do an upgrade.)

The upgrade on my work computer, a high end Dell laptop, took roughly an hour. Not so on my kid's computer. They have tons of games on it, and the 300GB hard drive, only had about 30GB of free space left. In other words, it's full. Anyway, the first time I tried the upgrade, the system completely hung after about six hours of installation. Ouch.

Fortunately, Windows has an auto-rollback feature; since the install failed, all I had to do was click a link, and it deleted the attempted upgrade and returned Vista to its former state. I was very glad to have that feature at 1 a.m. Sunday morning.

I then deleted some programs hogging up all the hard drive space, thinking that if Windows had more real estate to use for the upgrade, it might go smoother. If this one didn't work, I was going to do a clean install.

So, after about eight hours (yikes!) of install, the thing finally finished. Whew! And so far, so good. My kids report no problems with the upgraded computer. The moral of the story? Be prepared to wait, maybe a long time, for your upgrade to occur, and think about whether a clean install might be the way to go.