this is the first part of documenting my making the journey from windows vista to windows 7. before someone says, “get a mac” im already on that bandwagon. in fact, i am typing this out on a mac thank you very much. if reading about pc’s is not interesting to you, no worries, we’ll catch up later. but in the meantime…
when windows 7′s release was imminent i went on the ms website to see what the requirements would be to run it. turns out i needed to upgrade my os to at least vista sp1 but preferably sp 2. since i have had the nightly automatic upgrades option turned on, i was surprised that none of this was already done. this began my journey down the rabbit hole with hp and ms. i contacted hp via live chat and ran through as many steps with them as possible. at the end of the hour-long chat, i was still unable to run the downloaded sp 1 and 2 software packages. a few days later (i have a host of other things going on besides dealing with tech support issues), i contacted microsoft via their windows 7 upgrade help line. i spoke to a tech in india (?) who walked me through some shortcuts to make the computer run the upgrades. fascinating tips but alas, they didn’t work. after an hour and a half of those parlor tricks, we agreed that i would contact hp and request that they send some vista os dvds to me to do a system repair.
a week ago, i got in late (actually early in the morning) and decided before going to sleep to contact hp and request the dvds. the process was quick, dirty and painless (but 15.00 for s&h via regular mail for a few dvds without cases? c’mon hp). fast forward another week and the disks came in. i spent thursday trying to repair the os but it wasn’t having any of that. “wipe me clean or leave me alone,” it seemed to be saying (with a neck roll and a hand on hip). so i backed up all of my files with the enclosed software. that failed. so i backed it up manually, putting some documents into the “cloud” and most on an external hard drive and then doing another copy to my server (all of this had been synchronized on a regular basis in the past so there wasn’t too much to do).
after that, i wiped the hard drive clean and began to install the os. a prompt came up saying there was some boot file missing which led to a black screen and a circle of ctrl-alt-delete messages. still using the dvd from hp, i reinstalled again and this time the os installed. after that happened, vista wanted to install some necessary updates. 74 crucial updates. at 32 i went to bed. the update log stated at 5am or so it completed the updates. the next day i plugged in the external drive which had until that point been disconnected from the pc. the computer didn’t recognize the hard drive. so i plugged in the hard drive to another computer to make sure it hadn’t been corrupted. it read just fine. i then reconnected it to the vista machine and it was recognized.
i then ran service pack 1 from the external drive. when i realized it was going to be awhile, i left the house. when i returned it had installed and rebooted (numerous times from what i can tell). then windows wanted to do some more crucial updates. i ran those and began to run the service pack 2 installation which had also been downloaded to the external drive. that ran smoothly yet sucked up another hour of time.
my next thing is to reinstall the software i need on this computer (itunes, firefox, word, sound forge-the only pro music app i use on this box). after those have been installed, it will then be time to install a little bit o memory and windows 7.
No Comments