After many years, I am back at college on-line. The question of "why" is a topic for another post sometime. Classes are divided into 9 week blocks and I have decided that I will take a couple of weeks off between each block to let me catch up on stuff that I need to do. Among the things that I had on my TODO list for this break was to complete the article on Dynamic OpenClient and to do some cleanup of the computers at home.

Machines

We have 4 Windows boxes at home. Three are HP 32-bit notebooks and the other one is an HP 64-bit machine – mine. We bought all 4 machines during the course of this year and all came with Windows Vista. We have had no end of trouble with Vista. The machines work fine, but a lot of applications generate exceptions and hang under Vista that work fine on my XP box. So I decided to believe Microsoft's advertizing (probably a big mistake) that indicates that Windows 7 has been thoroughly tested. 

Preparation

My experience with Microsoft's upgrades have been patchy, at best. So I left this task as the very last task that I would perform before I start class on Monday. I figured on doing a complete reinstall if I needed to. Past exeperience, especially moving from NT to XP, taught me that a reinstall was a very likely possibility. That meant I needed to have everything else taken care of before I started.

I have a lot of stuff on my machine. My local drive has 195GB of programs and data on it. I am fastidious, though, about keeping myself up-to-date with the latest versions of software. This means that I did not need to do much in terms of getting the latest versions of software. Norton 360 does my backups for me so I did not need to do a new backup before I did the upgrade. So once I got the DVD, I could go ahead and install.

Upgrade

I started the upgrade on my 64-bit HP Pavilion Entertainment PC at around 4pm on Friday afternoon. I had to deauthorize my iTunes account as one of the preconditions to the install, but that was the only thing that the upgrade process identified as a potential problem. Once that was done, the process started and ran… and ran… and ran… and ran…

Around 10:00pm (6 hours later!) the install utility asked me for the product key, rebooted, and the upgrade was complete. I immediately did the on-line activation and ran Windows Update to get any updates that were necessary.

Windows Update installed several updates (I believe it was 38) and I restarted the machine again.

All told, the upgrade took about 7 hours, which is an insane amount of time.

Outcome

I spent most of Saturday morning testing everything and I had no problems at all. Now that things have settled down, I am very happy with the upgrade. Internet Explorer is working whereas before it was giving a lot of trouble. My machine is performing much better and all the applications I have installed work properly.

As I write this, I have DIRECTV's SuperCast software running with today's football games streaming and it works fine.

I spent Saturday afternoon and evening upgrading the other three machines. None of them has as much stuff on as mine, so they averaged about 4 hours total for the upgrade – still a lot of time. As with mine, they are all performing better and they have also stopped some of the exceptions that were happening.

Things I like

All four machines are performing better and seem more stable. We're not seeing the exceptions we saw before.

Another thing I was worried about is that I was told that a lot of applications would not work with Windows 7. None of my existing applications are affected by that. Everything works fine.

I like the new task bar. It is more organized and it has some useful options.

Networking with the other notebooks on the network is much easier and I have had no problem doing all the Unix stuff I do from my PC.

Things I don't like

This upgrade took a long time. 19 hours of upgrade time across 4 machines is ridiculous.

I was very frustrated that the Quick Launch toolbar now no longer exists and although you can pin things to the taskbar, none of the Quick Launch stuff was pinned to the taskbar for me. That was a pain.

Summary

For the most part, this upgrade went smoothly even if it took an inordinate amount of time. The machines are more stable than they were before and they seem to be faster. Internet Explorer performs much better and even Firefox is behaving pretty decently.

So far so good. I'll follow this up in a week or two with more on how this goes.