Vista 64 to Win 7 64

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OK, I’d like to take the plunge to Win 7 but want some advice first. I have 3 HDD in my computer. One has Vista 64 on it with other files, 300gb drive. One I use for data, 500gb drive and the other is now empty, formatted NTFS, 75gb. Would it be better to do a clean install on the empty HD and leave Vista alone and have a dual boot system? Or, just ditch Vista completely. I have had Vista for a year now and really haven’t had any problem with it, well just one minor thing. I have plenty of disc space left on the 300 and 500gb drives. The 75gb is a Seagate SATA that is 5 years old.

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OK, I’d like to take the plunge to Win 7 but want some advice first. I have 3 HDD in my computer. One has Vista 64 on it with other files, 300gb drive. One I use for data, 500gb drive and the other is now empty, formatted NTFS, 75gb. Would it be better to do a clean install on the empty HD and leave Vista alone and have a dual boot system? Or, just ditch Vista completely. I have had Vista for a year now and really haven’t had any problem with it, well just one minor thing. I have plenty of disc space left on the 300 and 500gb drives. The 75gb is a Seagate SATA that is 5 years old.

Many people have taken the plunge. Many others have installed into a dual boot environment until they are comfortable the Win7 is running fine. Since your Vista system is running fine most likely Win7 will run fine too. So, “it depends”.

Note: Be sure to backup anything important before starting with Win7.

Joe

--Joe

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OK, I’d like to take the plunge to Win 7 but want some advice first.

I happen to be one of those that Joe referenced who is in the dual boot camp, although I run only 32 bit OSs. You can see in other Lounge threads that I have a multi-boot system on two physical drives with XP, Vista and now Windows 7 Pro.

In addition to my preference of keeping the “older” OS around for Lounge question answering, the reason I prefer dual booting is that it’s the “safe and slow” way to move to a new OS while keeping your “security blanket” around for continued use.

If it were my choice, I’d use a partition on one of your larger drives rather than the smaller, simply because of its age. Keep us posted and good luck with whichever way you go.

PS I have not encountered any show-stoppers with Win 7 in the short time I’ve had it installed. Of course, it IS a learning process.

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I recently upgraded from Vista 64 to Win7 64. I had a problem that took me several weeks to resolve, so I would suggest that you retain your current Vista setup in case you encounter problems.

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I recently upgraded from Vista 64 to Win7 64. I had a problem that took me several weeks to resolve, so I would suggest that you retain your current Vista setup in case you encounter problems.

Would you care to post a snippet or capsule of the problem just in case it would be of some guidance for others?

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Would you care to post a snippet or capsule of the problem just in case it would be of some guidance for others?

The problem has to do with my Viewsonic VX922 monitor. At bootup it will not get a signal from the dvi 99% of the time. If I plug in a dvi adapter, adapter only, no cable, into the second dvi on the HD4870 vid card then unplug the first, wait a few seconds, plug it back in and unplug the adapter I can get a signal and monitor works fine. Go figure. I have a better work around. By setting the power options to put the monitor to sleep in 1 minute; when I boot up Vista 64, wait a minute, move mouse, I get a signal and everything is fine. So, I’m guessing it has something to do with Vista 64 not seeing the monitor even though I installed the correct driver for the monitor. Not big problem, more of a nuisance.

Thanks for all the help. I’ve got 16 days off in a couple of days so hoping to be able to install Win 7 then. I will probably just install on the smaller hdd, thinking of maybe just buying another small hdd just to install Win 7 and do dual boot until it proves stable enough to ditch Vista.

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Go for it!! I clean installed 4 PCs, 3 laptops (64 bit) and 1 older desktop (32 bit). I dumped Vista and XP, booted from the windows 7 DVD, did a custom install and loaded 3 copies of Windows 7 Home Premium and 1 copy of Windows 7 Ultimate. All went very smoothly with great results. When you load Windows 7 it will include a folder called windows.old in the windows explorer tree. This folder includes all your old vista or XP stuff which you can then drag and drop to the appropriate areas in your new OS. You will however have to reload all your programss, but this should be fairly straight forward.Once you have gotten all your stuff from the windows.old folder you can delete this folder. Have fun, you will love windows 7.
Ted

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Well, I dual boot Win 7 and Ubuntu, which took 30 minutes to install and configure. It took hours to upgrade Vista to Win 7. If I hadn’t gotten it for free I’d still be running Vista (when I had to that is), which isn’t vastly different from 7.

Vista to Win7 upgrades are known to take longer (and sometimes much longer) than a clean install. A clean install on a relatively new PC will most likely take 45 minutes or less.

Joe

--Joe

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“One has Vista 64 on it with other files, 300gb drive. One I use for data, 500gb drive and the other is now empty, formatted NTFS, 75gb.”

With that much storage, you have lots of choices! If you have all your personal data from Vista on your Data drive, my best advice is: Do NOT do the Upgrade to Windows 7.

Microsoft’s Upgrades never worked perfectly in the past, and I wouldn’t trust them to work flawlessly NOW. 98 to XP still sticks in my craw, and I didn’t even try for XP to Vista.

Here’s what I did:

I installed W7 Ultimate, as a dual-boot configuration, on my second hard drive (essentially, my SandBox), but did not Activate it (< This Is Critical!) Then, I took the time to get comfortable with W7, and tested all Vista apps and verified my Vista data was usable, within the 30 activation period. Then, and only then, I started again, and did the W7 "Custom Install", and formatted my Vista partition. In both cases, W7's Windows Updates found all the required device drivers, and everything worked perfectly. I'm "SandBoxing" Linux Mint 8, next.

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I too would recommend multibooting; if you don’t use the Vista much, well, no harm, no foul.

On my main system at home, I installed Server 2008 R2 Enterprise 64, pretty much based on Win 7. I did a clean install.

On my laptop, which I use infrequently, I had installed XP originally, but had earlier upgraded to Vista Ultimate.

I upgraded that upgraded laptop (after backing everything up, of course) to 7 Ultimate. It worked flawlessly, but others have had more problems.

You can do pretty much what you like, if you have good backups. Experiment!

RFT!!!
Dave Kelsen

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Why would you want to run Vista after installing Windows 7? Ok you have a Ford and just bought a Corvette…whataya goin to drive all the time? Dump Vista…7 is just plain nice. I didn’t mind Vista all that much but I think 7 is much better.

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Update: I took out the 75g HD and replaced it with a WD 750g. Storage is rather cheap, so I just eliminated an older SATA I drive. Shrank the 750 to 120 and installed Windows 7 64 Home Premium on the 120g. Couldn’t be happier with Win 7!! Much faster in every way than Vista 64! The problem with the Viewsonic vx922 went away also! I am not usually an adopter of just released OS’s but am glad I did this time.

I am keeping Vista, until I am sure I no longer need the data on that drive. Just yesterday I had to boot vista to get an activation key from the registry.

Two things I have encountered as a “problem” or annoying is Win 7 HP doesn’t allow me to add the snap-in Local Users and Groups and I cannot disable the taskbar thumbnails (I really find the thumbnails annoying).

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Two things I have encountered as a “problem” or annoying is Win 7 HP doesn’t allow me to add the snap-in Local Users and Groups and I cannot disable the taskbar thumbnails (I really find the thumbnails annoying).

If you are trying to use gpedit in a Home version, it is NOT there.

DaveA I am so far behind, I think I am First
Genealogy....confusing the dead and annoying the living

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Check this to disable the Taskbar thumbnails… http://www.blogsdna.com/2056/how-to-enable-or-disable-taskbar-thumbnails-preview-in-windows-7.htm I hope this helps

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