Windows 7
I’ve been using Windows XP for what seems like forever. My current laptop (HP Pavillion) came with Vista pre-installed, I made a set of system restore DVDs, played with it for a while then installed XP on it and marvelled at how much quicker it ran. Now Microsoft have launched Windows 7 and my laptop needs some serious housekeeping so I’m going to upgrade to the 90 day trial to see what all the hype’s about.
The first thing was to download Windows 7, the 90 trial can be downloaded from here, it’s a 2GB+ .iso and can be burned to DVD using any of many iso burners, I used an app caller isoburner.exe, but I can’t find any links to it now.
Next job was to prepare for system restore, I’ve nabbed an official Win XP SP3 install from here. Again these .iso files can be burned to CD and provide a full install if you’ve got a license key. All ready for rollback I’ve finally bought a NAS (Network Attached Storage) backup drive, the Iomega Home Media drive (500gb). The reviews seem fairly good, it connects directly to my wireless hub and can be used as a media drive for XBox 360, an iTunes server and a USB print server. And a backup drive.
Setup started quite simply. Plug in the power and Ethernet cable to your network router and install the software on your PC. This is where it all went wrong and somewhere between my firewall, wireless connection and iomega software my laptop got into a cycle where it would reboot just after XP told me my firewall was turned off. Trying not to panic and with tea-time rapidly approaching I turned off the wireless connection on my laptop uninstalled the offending software and went back to Plan A: connecting to the drive through explored. Simples, logged onto my router, got the IP of the new drive and connected to it through Explorer.
Finally backed up my measly 100gb of ‘personal’ data (over Ethernet, wireless was t o o s l o w) completely unbenchmarked it took about 5 1/2 hours. I only had one ‘cyclic redundancy check’ which occured twice but with the same file so chances are it’s a corrupt file or issue with my current HDD.
Next. After verifying my backed up data it’s time to install Windows 7.
