A Clean Install to Windows 7
Windows 7 will be publicly available starting October 2009. Enterprise customers and MSDN subscribers already received access to the final code by the time of this writing. As I am part of one of these groups I had access to the Windows 7 media and decided to install it on a brand-new PC. I decided to do a clean install versus an in place upgrade as in place upgrades tend to have issues down the road.
After backing up my data to an external hard drive I booted from the installation DVD and went through the options to install this new operating system. The install is straight forward and does not require that much attention to succeed. The most important step is really to choose the correct partition on the hard drive to make sure you are only using that partition the OS needs to be on and do not delete any important data from secondary drives. It is important to note that the installer does not format the drive by default. You will need to go through the advanced options to make that selection.
Depending on the speed of your PC you will be on your way installing Windows within 2 minutes or less. The installation of the new operating system is fast and easy. Within about 25 minutes I was greeted by the new login screen and a wizard to customize this installation of Windows to my needs. I added the name for my user account + gave the machine a more friendly name than the suggested (cryptic) one. After I logged in I joined the local domain and let group policy do its thing to further adjust computer settings. Please note that you might have to turn off the building Windows Firewall.
Before installing any software I ran Windows Update and selected the option to search online for additional patches and updates to make sure my Windows 7 installation would be fully up to date. An additional reboot was required and I combined it with another pending task. As a last step I had to activate my copy of Windows 7. First I had to update the product key and then I clicked on the activation link from the computer properties page. Activation completed within 1 minute. Please note that this might not apply to you depending on if you use media provided by your computer manufacturer as they distribute a pre-activated version of Windows 7 that might only work on your specific computer.
Conclusion: Windows 7 is very easy to install - even for the technical challenged user. If a computer is used outside of a business environment the complexity level is extremely low. Windows 7 is taking advantage of existing hardware and performs better than Windows Vista or Windows XP from what I can tell.
After backing up my data to an external hard drive I booted from the installation DVD and went through the options to install this new operating system. The install is straight forward and does not require that much attention to succeed. The most important step is really to choose the correct partition on the hard drive to make sure you are only using that partition the OS needs to be on and do not delete any important data from secondary drives. It is important to note that the installer does not format the drive by default. You will need to go through the advanced options to make that selection.
Depending on the speed of your PC you will be on your way installing Windows within 2 minutes or less. The installation of the new operating system is fast and easy. Within about 25 minutes I was greeted by the new login screen and a wizard to customize this installation of Windows to my needs. I added the name for my user account + gave the machine a more friendly name than the suggested (cryptic) one. After I logged in I joined the local domain and let group policy do its thing to further adjust computer settings. Please note that you might have to turn off the building Windows Firewall.
Before installing any software I ran Windows Update and selected the option to search online for additional patches and updates to make sure my Windows 7 installation would be fully up to date. An additional reboot was required and I combined it with another pending task. As a last step I had to activate my copy of Windows 7. First I had to update the product key and then I clicked on the activation link from the computer properties page. Activation completed within 1 minute. Please note that this might not apply to you depending on if you use media provided by your computer manufacturer as they distribute a pre-activated version of Windows 7 that might only work on your specific computer.
Conclusion: Windows 7 is very easy to install - even for the technical challenged user. If a computer is used outside of a business environment the complexity level is extremely low. Windows 7 is taking advantage of existing hardware and performs better than Windows Vista or Windows XP from what I can tell.
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