Vista Upgrade to Windows 7: A True Story
Today is Tuesday 26th January; Australia Day in Australia. I have spent most of the afternoon on this national holiday upgrading a DELL Inspiron 6400 from Windows Vista to Windows 7. This was my first hands-on upgrade of a Windows Vista computer to Windows 7. The results were so amazing that I thought I would share them.
The key thing here is that this was an “upgrade” to Windows 7 and not a fresh install, or Custom Install as Microsoft insists on calling it. I have done a couple of fresh install or custom install upgrades of Vista to Windows 7, but this was my first actual Vista to Windows 7 upgrade; if that make any sense (it will to the IT people reading this—if there are any).
Upgrading from Vista to Windows 7 means that you do not, or should not anyway, need to re-install all your programs, or re-establish your e-mail connections and data, re-install printer drivers or other drivers, or copy your data back onto the computer from a backup. All this stays in place on the computer during the upgrade and is all still there after the upgrade.
Following is a picture of the upgraded computer now running Windows 7. The wallpaper used here was just selected at random (cough) from one of the many wallpaper sites on the Web.
So, why am I bothering to blog this? Well partially because it is my first ever actual upgrade of a Windows Vista computer to Windows 7, but mainly because I was very happy with the outcome and decided I needed to share it.
The following table shows some times to the nearest whole second of how long things were taking when this computer was running Vista compared to the times after the computer had been upgraded to Windows 7.
|
Doing this . . . |
Took this many seconds before |
And this many seconds after |
|
Starting up and getting to the logon screen |
39 |
18 |
|
The computer ready to use after logging on |
36 |
18 |
|
Total Start up Time |
75 |
36 |
|
Shutdown the computer |
48 |
15 |
|
To Launch Internet Explorer |
7 |
3 |
|
To open the Control Panel |
5 |
1 |
|
To Launch Windows Explorer |
3 |
1 |
As you can see, upgrading to Windows 7 significantly improved the performance of the computer. The biggest improvement was in shutting down which went from 48 seconds to just 15; an improvement of 33 seconds. And starting up times improved by well over a half going from one and a quarter minutes to just over half a minute.
Also, from the graphic at the top of the blog you can see that the number of running processes under Windows 7 after the upgrade is 48. I did not take a picture of the screen when I started (I wish I had) but the number of processes that were showing under Vista was 88. So the number of running processes has almost halved as well.
In addition, prior to the Windows 7 upgrade, this Vista computer was having trouble maintaining a connection to my wireless network even though the signal strength was five bars—which is a full strength signal. The wireless connection was so flakey I had to run a cable to the computer to maintain an Internet connection. Post upgrade there were no wireless network connection issues.
For the IT people reading this—that might be interested—some specification notes for the DELL Inspiron 6400 follow:
>> Year of manufacture = 2007
>> Intel T5300 CPU
>> Dual Core 1.73Ghz
>> 2GB RAM
I should note that prior to executing the upgrade I did perform a number of basic pre-upgrade tasks such as doing a disk cleanup (using the Windows disk cleanup tool), uninstalling a number of drive-by craplette applications that had made it onto the computer, and running CHKDSK (which found no issues).
Well that’s about it. Post a comment if you have any questions.
Barry.