Last week, Microsoft made the Windows 7 Release Candidate (RC) available for the public to download and try for a year (the RC expires on June 1, 2010). I decided to take the plunge and try it out figuring that it couldn’t be any worse off then my current Windows Vista.
I’m going to take a minute and lay out the steps I took so that if you would like to test it as well, some of the things I did to prepare might be of some worth to you.
- Review the hardware requirements to see if your system will run Windows7. Microsoft suggests the following minimum requirements:
- A PC for testing that meets these minimum system requirements (specific to Windows 7 RC and subject to change in the final version of Windows 7):
- 1 GHz or faster 32-bit (x86) or 64-bit (x64) processor
- 1 GB RAM (32-bit) / 2 GB RAM (64-bit)
- 16 GB available disk space (32-bit) / 20 GB (64-bit)
- DirectX 9 graphics processor with WDDM 1.0 or higher driver
- Make a BACKUP! I cannot stress this enough. Unless you don’t care to lose anything on your PC, I highly suggest backing up your PC to an external hard drive or some online backup service. I went an extra step and copied my important documents to one external drive, backed up my PC to another external drive and also saved my last backup on my HP MediaSmart Home Server. All this took about 2-3 hours but I now have peace of mind knowing my files are safe and nothing will get lost.
- If you like, you can download and run the Windows 7 Upgrade Advisor Beta. This program from Microsoft will scan your system and attempt to identify any potential compatibility issues that your system might experience.
- Download the Windows 7 RC file from Microsoft’s website. Make sure you download the file that matches your system (32-bit or 64-bit). Don’t be fooled by emails offering links to download the installation files. Windows 7 RC is free so there’s no need not to go to Microsft’s site to download the file.
- Create an installation DVD to run the installation from. The download is an ISO file and the file can easily be copied to a blank DVD.
- Decide if you want to do a clean install (choose to have the installation program format the hard drive) or upgrade from your current OS. As much as I wanted to do a clean install, I chose to do the upgrade from Windows Vista Ultimate so that I wouldn’t have to reinstall all my programs.
- Insert the DVD into your DVD-rom and it should autostart on its own and bring up the installation menu. (If for some reason it doesn’t start right away, you can refer to the Windows 7 installation instructions here).
- Windows 7 will start installing on your computer! Since I chose the upgrade from my previous Windows Vista Ultimate, my upgrade took 3+ hours. I believe the average install time on a clean system is roughly over an hour.
So far, I have been very pleased with the stability and new features. I have had a few small issues which I will write about soon but nothing that I haven’t found an easy fix for.
If all goes well over the next week or so, I will install Windows 7 on my desktop so that I can test out the media streaming capabilities. The only catch is that you can only stream your media between 2 or more Windows 7 PCs. Here’s an article that Simon @ DigitalLifestyle wrote on how to setup the streaming.
I’ll be posting any Windows 7 news or other TechTips I might find so subscribe to my feed or bookmark me and stop by often to visit!
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