It was time to upgrade

closeHey, just so you know ... this post is now about 14 years and 1 month old. Please keep that in mind as it very well may contain broken links and/or outdated information.

March 1 is quickly approaching and starting Monday, people who are still running the Release Candidate of Windows 7 will start seeing the expiration message. I’ve been running the RC at home since May of last year and knew this time would eventually come, so this past week I purchased the Home Premium upgrade media from Amazon along with some extra RAM for my Dell Inspiron 530 (it had two 512mb chips that I pulled and replaced with two new 1gb chips to bring it up to 4gb total).

Based on my previous experience with the Windows Easy Transfer utility, I used WET to backup my documents and settings to an external hard drive. To be doubly sure I didn’t lose anything, I also just copied my entire user profile folder (C:\Users\<my login>) to the same hard drive. I wanted to do a clean install with the upgrade media (and also go with the 64-bit version), so I made sure I had that external drive with my WET backup attached when I booted from the Win7 DVD. From within the Windows 7 Setup, I formatted my entire 640gb internal drive, completely wiping out the RC partition. Since Setup knew about the WET backup, the Win7 activation process was successful and the rest of the install was smooth.

After booting Windows 7 Home Professional 64-bit for the first time and then installing all the outstanding updates, the real fun began. I used WET to restore my files and settings and then began the long process of re-installing and re-configuring all of my applications (64-bit versions where applicable). I had made screenshots of the Programs and Features list before upgrading to facilitate this, so I knew exactly what I meeded to re-install. I had also taken screenshots of my Taskbar and Start Menu so I could put everything back the way I had it under the RC.

So I’m back up and running and have finally joined the world of 64-bit!

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