This page describes Upgrading Windows XP to Windows 7 - Fresh Install

Moving from XP to Windows 7

Many Windows XP users remained with XP rather than upgrading to Vista, as reports rolled in from users via the news, blogs and forums, directing angst at the responsiveness and functionality of the Vista operating system.

While Windows 7 is still in Beta, there is a good chance that even the most cautious of Windows users will find good reason to upgrade to this new OS — The largest being that their machines will run faster, as the Windows 7 resource requirements are much less than either Vista, or XP.

With backwards comparability, faster speed and less resource impact, there isn’t much reason not to upgrade if the cost of doing so remains in the user friendly boundary.

In this article we are going to go through the various steps and gotchas that accompany moving from one OS to another. Our greatest focus is going to be directed at preparation, and forewarnings, which if followed should see you upgraded with little to no worries.

Most of the problems with upgrading a system to a new OS can be tracked directly back to the steps taken (or rather ignored) in preparing for the new system. We are going to want to make sure that we :

Back up all of our data files
Check our major software for compatibility
Check that drivers are available for our peripherals
Know how our email is going to move over
Make sure we backup favorites and passwords
Rack our brains for the obvious

I’ve used the phrase “new OS” several times now, and make no mistake that this is exactly what we are doing, we are installing a brand new OS on our computer, just as if we were going to wipe the drive and install MacOS, BSD or Linux. If you are running XP, there is no “upgrade” installation option. To do it right, we are going to back up everything we need, make sure we have install disks for our software, wipe the drive with a good format, and then install the new OS.

With the right preparation this is not a worry or even a stressful proposition, in fact we have some opportunities at this point for setting up a few other options we might have been considering before this point, such as:

creating a dual-boot system
partitioning our internal drive in a different way
setting up a security partition.

Prepping for the move

We want lists, real ones, not lists in our heads. I recommend paper and pen, no matter how awful that sounds, or heretical coming from a computer geek. If you have been using XP for this long, then you either don’t use your computer at all, and didn’t want to be bothered by upgrading, or you use all the time and didn’t want to be bothered by upgrading. Either way, chances are you are not as clear on just what you need and where it is located as you might think you are.

Putting a pad of paper and a pen beside your keyboard for a few days, to jot down the programs you use on a daily bases will help you focus on what needs to be done, and where you plan on getting the new installations from after you move. It will also give you an idea of how long your new installation is going to take.

Much of my software is Open source, at least the software I use on a daily basis. I use OpenOffice for example. I have to have that. I also use a mind-mapping software called FreeMind, and another called MindJet (not open-source, and expensive, but a great package). Then there are the packages I need, but I don’t use very often. Truecrypt, The SwordProject, Gimp, XAMPP, Stellarium.

All of these packages have one thing in common, I don’t have install disks for them, and I doubt that I have the install programs for them. They are all on the web, and I can download them, so I don’t think about that too much.

However, if I’m going to install a new OS, I may have some problems getting the network running right away… but I still need those packages, so before I do anything, I’m going to make sure I have the installation software for each of them on a CD or external drive.

Watch out for bedbugs

I mentioned above that I may lose my Internet connection for a while. Is this because Windows 7 might not work correctly?

No, it will be because I didn’t write down my network settings and connection passwords, and I am now on hold for three hours with COX, talking to four or five subordinate gatekeepers, repeating the same identification information (name, address, account number) before I’m able to talk to a real tech who, in five minutes, will tell me what I could have written down on my pad of paper, and I’ll be back up and running. — three hours later.

And what about that Virtual CloneDrive utility I have which mounts my ISO files like they were real CD’s in a drive, and is so slick that I forget that it is not part of the OS system? I don’t even think about it most of the time, because it is really cool that way, but trust me, as soon as it is gone, I’ll think about it, with angst.

Will I even remember the utility’s name, so I can go get that beautiful piece of freeware again? Probably not. I’ll wind up with some package that sounds like the same one, but installs a few nasty malware programs on my brand new installation.

Some of the areas, like the XAMPP, have literally hundreds of little settings and changes and tweaks I have made over the years to get it working just the way I want it to work, so I’m going to want to make sure that I copy all of those settings and files over. My computer is lived in, its a home, it has a threshold, vampires can’t come in without asking permission.

Unfortunately, like my home, I forget where my keys are half the time, so setting out that pad of paper and a pen, and jotting down notes of what I use and where all those things are, is going to save me hours of time and frustration during my installation.

If I let the bedbugs byte, all of this will cause stress and frustration and will taint my experience before I have even seen Windows 7. So even though it sounds cheesy and simple minded, I’m going to start making notes and insuring I have the best possible record of the home my computer has become.

Further Prep Work: Clean house.

This is not required but certainly makes the process easier, and if you are backing up to CD’s, then you will fewer disks in your efforts.

Go into your Contorl Panel — Start -> Settings –> Control Panel
Open your Software Manager and uninstall every package you don’t use.

Go into your My Documents area and other places you are aware of and get rid of files you know you aren’t going to want… you know, those files you see from time to time and thing “I need to delete that”… now would be the time to get these out of the way.

Making our backups

If you have the means, get an external drive. For less than $100 you can get 500 gigs, for less that $200 — a terabyte. It is going to be nice if you can simply copy everything you have on your computer to an external drive. Everything. And the money will not go to waste afterwards — you will find plenty of music and images and books to load up on your external drive afterwards.

If you don’t have the means, I feel ya, I’m on that edge most of the time myself. If this is the case, you will want to get your Data files.

Documents
Spreadsheets
Address Books
Music files
eBooks
Notes
Attachments
Setting files
Videos
Playlists
Favorites
Game saves?

Focus on your data, and copy all of them onto CD’s or DVD drives. DVD is better, it holds more.

After you make those copies, go through each of the disks and make sure that the disks are good, then set them aside.

There are programs which will “mirror” your drive and spread out the whole on to several CD’s. I don’t like them for projects like this, even the very good ones. The reason is, too many things can go wrong. A disk can be bad, or get damaged during the process, and then the whole is nothing but junk and art-and-crafts trinkets. I prefer to have direct copies of the data files that any computer can access, without requiring a third-party software package to be installed.

There are some tools however which will help with some of the data file types. Let’s take a look at these

Picasa
Picasa is a photo and image manager. It can search your computer for all of your images, and manage all of them for you. Not only images, but video files as well. It also has a very cool Backup feature which will copy every image on your drive to an external drive or set of CD’s. Picasa can also put quite a few of those images onto an account area in cyberspace.

Picasa will not find files like Photoshop or Gimp files however, so if you have image editor programs, or programs that save in their own formats, you will need to discover and back these up on your own. If you just use a Digital camera and share family photos with several people and through various means, Picasa is a good tool to use

Areca Backup
Areca Backup is an easy to use, open source, free software program that works on several different OS’s, such as WinXP, Vista, Win7, as well as Unix, Linux and a few others. I have been using it for some time keeping backups on external drives. It allows for file filters and directory filters, so that you are only backing up files which mean something to you, and has some other, rather nice and useful utilities as well. Worth looking at.

I know I mentioned above to not go in for a backup program, and I still mean that, but if you absolutely have to, this is a fairly good one, which uses the ZIP format for compressing, and the destination areas on the external drive can be read by any computer you hook the external drive up to.

Email considerations

If you are using Outlook, or (awk!) Outlook Express, and want to backup your email, then you need to look at how to do this, because it is not obvious nor easy at all. Outlook Express is not on Win7, in fact, there is no email client installed in Windows 7 at all. So if you are an Outlook Express user, you have some work ahead of you in order to get up and running on Windows 7.

Moving from Outlook Express to a new email client on Windows 7 is beyond the scope of this article, but we will have an article on exactly how to do this very soon (this message is going to be removed soon, replaced with a link to that article in the next day or so).

If you are an Outlook user, then you will be using your Office and your Outlook on Windows 7 as well. Outlook has a backup and restore function, which you should use.

Thunderbird, Eudora, Netscape Messenger, and Opera Mail all use what is called the “mbox format”, which means moving to a new system or even to a new client is not a worry — The new clients will either have an import function or you are just going to copy the folders back to your profile area. We will have a new article on moving and backing up email clients using the mbox format in the next few days as well… so look for that here

If you are given the opportunity to Import your files, rather than simply copying the backup back into the profile area, always use the Import function, no matter what client you decide on .

Favorites and Passwords
Most web browsers these days offer to save passwords for you, and many people use that functionality. Most browsers either have add-ons or functionality to back these password files up.

If so, great. If not, then there is a utility, which I can’t live without any longer, which you can store all of your passwords in, and even some of your other private information, and carry that program and data file over to an external drive.

The real plus of this utility is that it will run off that external drive using any computer it is attached to — provided of course that you remember the master password for the data file.

The utility is called KeePass, and I personally love it, as it keeps everything nice and safe, is easy to use, and very convenient.

You can also export your Favorites or Bookmarks from your browser and paste the list from a text editor, straight into KeePass as well. All of your favorite web sites and all of your account information in one place, safe and snug. What could be better?

What did we miss?

What about templates for Word, ones you have made, ones you have found, ones you brought home from work? Power Point files? What about macro files for Excel and Word? Did you get all of those? Database files. Saved Website pages.

Video card information. What brand, model and settings are being used right now. Do you have the drivers for your video card? You probably will not need them, but download them from the manufacturer’s web site anyway, so that you have them on hand.

Same goes for your network card. Again, you are running XP, so it is highly unlikely that Windows 7 will have a problem with your video or network cards. Get the drivers anyway.

If you use Firefox, and I can’t imagine why you wouldn’t if you are still running XP, you have probably collected a large set of very nice, useful add-ons over the years, which you don’t even think about any more, as you use them over an over again. You might want to write the names of them down so you can reinstall them.

Firewalls and Protection

Most firewall programs, other than, Windows, allow you to back up your firewall settings. That list of programs and utilities and ports that you have allowed, or your blacklist of areas you discovered you seriously want blocked. If you have a firewall, and have been using it for the last few years, you know exactly what I’m talking about. If you have been relying on Windows XP’s firewall for protection, … forget I brought this up and move on.

Nice and clean
Now that we have everything copied over to an external drive or safely on CD/DVD disks, ready to reinstall, we want to make a quick check over everything, and then format the disk.

Windows 7 will offer to do this for us, and we will let it do so, after we’ve done it first.

Why?

Most problems on an fresh install come from some part of the old system hanging around, and being assimilated into the new installation. Bits, Bytes, trash, crap. We want to format the drive ourselves, check it over to see if there are major areas of damage on the drive, and then start our installation. Yes, again, Windows 7 will do exactly the same thing for us, and we will let it, but this will give us the best chance of not having to go through all of this again.

It is also the last step of our paranoid damage control list. At this point, we are ready to install, and start building back up our system.

Drive Partitioning

How big is your internal drive? If you have less than 200 gigs on your internal drive, skip this thought. If you have more, even 250, and you have been thinking about having a dual-boot system, or having a hidden secure OS on your drive, now might be a good time to think about splitting your drive and setting it up. In fact, now is the best time to do it, as you will not have to worry about data corruption or OS failures.

I mentioned TrueCrypt before. TrueCrypt is a highly recommended Security and Encryption program. It will encrypt your entire drive, or it can create hidden encrypted OS partitions, which don’t even show up if you are using the best computer forensic sniffers.

The installation software for Windows 7 will allow you to set partitions, and I recommend you use that utility to set the drives up. After that, installing another OS, such as a Linux toybox, or even XP, onto the other partition will be no trouble at all.

Hardware Upgrades?

If you would like to add a new hard drive, upgrade your RAM, or get a new video card, this is the time to do it, as most of the settings and setup will be done for you by the installation program for Win7. You can always do it later, but it will save you a few hours of time to do it now.

Installing Windows 7

Most of the install process is simply clicking on the Ok button, and watching a blue line grow longer. Plug-n-Play is no longer Plug-n-Pray. You can safely choose the default on just about every question. The whole OS installation will take close to an hour-and-a-half for most systems.

The Step By Step with the Easy Transfer Method

There is a utility you can use to move all of your files from XP to Win7, that comes with the Win7 Install disk. I’ve walked you through finding all of your files, and getting them onto an external drive, which I highly recommend, however, this utility does exist. You will still need an external drive, or enough room on your existing drive to make the backup file this utility will create. It may save you some time as well, but I would still make the backups I’ve described so far, even if you are going to try to use this utility.

Copy files using Windows Easy Transfer

Insert the Windows 7 DVD while running Windows XP. If the Windows 7 installation window opens automatically, close it.
Open Windows Explorer by right-clicking the Start menu, and then clicking Explore.
Browse to the DVD drive on your computer and click migsetup.exe in the SupportMigwiz directory. The Windows Easy Transfer window opens.
Click Next.
Select An external hard disk or USB flash drive.
Click This is my old computer. Windows Easy Transfer scans the computer.
Click Next. You can also determine which files should be migrated by selecting only the user profiles you want to transfer, or by clicking Customize.
Enter a password to protect your Easy Transfer file, or leave the box blank, and then click Save.
Browse to the external location on the network or to the removable media where you want to save your Easy Transfer file, and then click Save.
Click Next. Windows Easy Transfer displays the file name and location of the Easy Transfer file you just created.

Use the Windows 7 DVD to upgrade

Start Windows 7 Setup by browsing to the root folder of the DVD in Windows Explorer, and then double clicking setup.exe.
Click Go online to get the latest updates (recommended) to retrieve any important updates for Windows 7. This step is optional. If you choose not to check for updates during Setup, click Do not get the latest updates.
Read and accept the Microsoft Software License Terms. Click I accept the License Terms (required to use Windows), and then click Next. If you click I decline (cancel installation), Windows 7 Setup will exit.
Click Custom to perform an upgrade to your existing Windows installation.

Note: When you perform a custom installation of Windows 7, files that were used in the earlier version of Windows are stored in a Windows.old folder.

The folders that are stored in the Windows.old folder contain some files that you used in the earlier version of Windows. The type of files that are stored depends on your computer. We recommend that you always back up any important files before you install a new operating system.

Select the partition where you would like to install Windows. To move your existing Windows installation into a Windows.old folder and replace the operating system with Windows 7, select the partition where your current Windows installation is located.
Click Next and then click OK.

Windows 7 Setup will proceed without further interaction.

Copy files to the destination computer

If you saved your files and settings in an Easy Transfer file on a removable media such as a UFD rather than on a network share, insert the removable media into the computer.
Click Start, click All Programs, click Accessories, click System Tools, and then click Windows Easy Transfer.
The Windows Easy Transfer window opens.
Click Next.
Click An external hard disk or USB flash drive.
Click This is my new computer.
Click Yes, open the file.
Browse to the location where the Easy Transfer file was saved. Click the file name, and then click Open.
Click Transfer to transfer all files and settings. You can also determine which files should be migrated by selecting only the user profiles you want to transfer, or by clicking Customize.
Click Close after Windows Easy Transfer has completed moving your files.

Delete Windows.old directory

To reclaim the disk space, you can delete the Windows.old directory.

Use the Disk Cleanup system tool by following these steps:

Open Disk Cleanup. Click Start, click All Programs, click Accessories, click System Tools, and then click Disk Cleanup.
Click Clean up system files. Previous installations of Windows are scanned.
Select Previous Windows installations and any other categories of files you want to delete.
Click OK and then click Delete Files.

After that, you are installing all the software programs. Then, putting data files back on the system.

You may have discovered the value of the My Documents directory during this process. If you had data files scattered all over the place before you started this, you might consider at this point, putting them back under the My Documents directory tree.

Restart your computer often as you install software packages.

The order I have found agreeable in my experience is:

Start with Network Connection
Install programs
Learn to use the new Library (My Documents) area (see below)
Return your data

Once you have Internet Connection, then you can always look up how to do something, send an email to someone asking for help, and download any drivers you discover you need.

Taking a look around

Since the days of Win95, moving from one version of Windows to the next has not had a huge learning curve, especially since you could always set most of the user interfaces, menus and displays to the “classic mode” and just do what you always did, back in 96 (yes, Win95 came out in 96), however, there are some changes which might take you a few “hmm” moments.

Most of these “hmm” moments are going to be caused by some “hidden in plain sight” areas. I’ve hit several now … you’ll understand as soon as you see them.

But here is a good example: I want to change the default directory that the programs and system identify as “My Documents”, so that “My Documents” is on my W: drive. This was fairly simply in Vista, and on Servers, but in XP you needed to do some hunting and editing of registry areas.

However, like I said, there was functionality for this alteration in Vista, and so I assumed that it was on Win7 as well, … because it is a seriously good idea to keep your data files on a different drive than your programs and OS, even if that other drive is merely a partition.

So, where is it?

Hidden in plain sight — if you click the mouse on the plain text information (1 library location) which tells us how many directories are creating this Document Library, the text turns into a Button, and the Button opens a utility window to add and manage the directories which create the Document Library.

Most of the chin rubbing and “hmm” moments are going to be caused by this “hidden in plain sight” user interface. Colors of light blue often hide exactly what you are looking for, but you can’t see them, because your eyes gloss right over the words, and then there are areas like this “plain-text-2-button” thing. Sure, it makes the over-all look of the screen appear nicer, but what new user is going to think of this? I wouldn’t have, until I started clicking on everything, just to see what would happen.

So I predict a few frustrating moments with the new interface, and there doesn’t appear to be a “Return to Classic” option.

If that is the worst of it though, the move is well worth the speed and stability.

Coming soon

Setting up Areca Backup
Moving XP Outlook Express Mail to a New client on Win7
Moving XP mbox Mail Clients to Windows 7
No Email Client on Windows 7, what should you use
Personal and Home Email, Best Practices
Windows 7 Libraries, The Home folders
Adding a Hard Drive to Windows 7

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