Not seeing any follow up posts made some people worry a problem ensued (others wondered why we are writing about Windows…). No problems – there are time restrictions on posting to blogs with real work needing to be done -and journal articles to be completed etc.. Here is the run down of what happened and my interpretation:
- It took just over two hours to run the complete upgrade (after uninstalling my anti-virus software – more on that in a moment).
- Recognize that two hours is a long time – but that is what they said it might take – and I have a ton of software on this machine.
- Once it ran through the process (rebooting along the way as Microsoft indicated it would) I was presented with essentially all of my stuff in a new operating system. It looked relatively close the Vista system with some minor changes.
What had to be ‘fixed’. Not everything worked perfectly right off. Here is what happened that needed to be fixed:
- Had to reinstall the Anti-virus to be able to connect to the outside world. We use a firewall that ENFORCES updated AV software (a good idea). Then, we had to install it again. Then today, had to reinstall it again to get an outside internet connection.
- Called our IT guy over to resolve the AV issue. After a few minute search on the AV site he performed a firmware update to our firewall to handle Win7 clients (this took a few minutes).
- Later on, once again we couldn’t connect outside (after working for awhile). The AV site showed that the Microsoft Firewall was blocking access. Their firewall was working fine. Apparently two firewalls might be too much. Disabled the extra firewall and it works great.
- Nothing
What seems neat or worked well:
- With a significant upgrade, they caution that you may need to have your software disks ready to reinstall. Besides the AV stuff, the aircard software ran its own install/change (of course we had to give it permission). Everything else has worked as it did before.
- Printing, networking, backup services, etc.
- The speed of the system generally seems a bit faster. Though Vista for this configuration was always pretty fast.
- The mouse over options on the bottom are pretty effective for navigating – you see all 6 email files and can simply move to the image and you open that on your desktop
- They have a warning flag system if anything is not up to security standards (if you remove the AV – all of a sudden a red circle with an ‘X’ in the middle shows up saying – you don’t have an Anti-virus software…
- The extended desktop options for viewing multiple screens works even better than Vista. Nice.
All in all a relatively painfree upgrade. Glad I went with Vista as it worked well. DELIGHTED I went with Vista since upgrading from Vista to Win7 is a non-event.
-C