All righty then, the computer is all together, fresh and clean, the BIOS is set to boot from the CD/DVD drive. Plonk the Windows 7 disk into the drive and let's get it going. Just to note that I'm installing Windows 7 Pro 64bit so if you're using a different version there might be some slight differences. I also got my camera out for some old school screen shots so please excuse the shakiness but hopefully they're helpful. To be honest though, it was really easy so just follow the instructions and you'll be fine.

1. Start the computer – put Windows 7 disk into the optical drive.




2. A message saying “Press a key to boot from CD” may come up in which case press a key!




3. The CD drive will spin up and you'll be told that “Windows is loading files...”.




4. After about a minute you are treated to the colourful arrival of the Microsoft logo which then takes you a pretty screen where it asks you to specify where you are and what language you want to use. This always defaults to US so change it if you need to.

1. Press “Next” and then “Install Now”.




2. You're now presented with one of those mystical license screens where you sign away all your rights to anything – tick the box to accept and click “Next”.




3. Next it asks you what sort of install you are doing, an “Upgrade” or an “Custom” installation. We're choosing “Custom”. To call it “advanced” is a bit misleading, this is just a regular, common or garden install. 

1. Now it wants to know if it can create a separate partition for system files – of course it can! That's fine, whatever it wants.




2. Then we get to choose where we want to install Windows. I'm using a really big drive so i'm going to create a smaller partition (splitting the drive into two) for Windows. Keeping the system drive quite small forces you to keep things a bit tidy and is also much easier and quicker to backup. Although I usually have an awful lot of stuff installed so i'm going for a 300GB partition.




3. To create this partition click on “Drive Options” at the bottom right of the screen and then click “New” and specify the size you want.

1. Select the newly created partition – if in doubt it's the partition with the same amount of free space as the total size (therefore nothing on it) and in this case it's the second partition labelled as type “Primary”.




2. .Click “Next” and Windows will install. This will take about 10 minutes so go an make a nice cup of tea.




3. Ok, you're almost there. Type in your user name and call your computer something – it's worth doing this simply because Windows 7 loves networks and discovering computers so if you call it Music then you'll know exactly what it is – got to be short, one word, simple.




4. Set a password if you want to – I never do




5. Enter your Product Key, you don't have to put the dashes in and you can do this later if you like.




6. “Help Protect...” select “Ask Later”




7. Check your time zone.




8. Windows is now preparing your desktop and you're nearly there.




9. Tada! It's done and you're presented with a disappointingly garish, vaguely organic looking, Microsoft logo wallpaper and a wonderfully uncluttered desktop.

That took like 18 minutes or something which isn't bad and I must say that the boot to desktop time is pretty swift. Before doing anything else pull out your motherboard driver CD and run it – or if it doesn't have Win7 drivers download them from your motherboards website. Windows 7 will have pretty much all the drivers so at most it will be updating the network adapter, maybe the on-board audio and make sure you get the latest graphics drivers for your video card.

First Impressions

It's all a bit bright and breezy, not in love with the initial desktop at all but a couple of clicks into “Personalize” and it's looking much improved with some hi-rez backgrounds and a better resolution. It's uncluttered, no Windows side-bar, gadgets are available but you have to opt-in and they can be scattered over the desktop wherever you like is you so wish (not for me thanks). The “Aero” transparent look is taken straight from Vista but it's evolved a bit which I'll come onto later, but the immediate difference is in the taskbar (the bar at the bottom of the screen) which is worth looking at. The Start button is pretty similar, giving access to all your programs control panels and wotnot, but next to that you find that the “quick launch” has now taken over the rest of the taskbar with much larger and nicer icons. When you used to open any window it would appear on your taskbar so you can switch between open windows and applications very easily – this has been the case since Windows 95. In Windows 7 your open document appears only as an icon and any similar documents get stacked behind it. Hovering the mouse over the icon reveals large, active thumbnail versions which you can switch between or close from there. It takes a little while to get used to but is very tidy and efficient once you do. All explorer windows stack up behind the Windows Explorer “libraries” folder – libraries are a new sorting concept where a library can show files from all over the place – you simply mark which folders you'd like to add to the library. The other cool features I like with the Windows Explorer folder is that it gives access to recent documents and frequently used folders. You can also pin shortcuts for folder to it making like a customised start button – Microsoft calls these “Jump Lists”. Pinning an application to the taskbar is also a doddle – right-click the shortcut and select “Pin to taskbar” - easy and you can shuffle them around at will.

Right, so the Aero interface. With Vista it looked nice but ultimately got in the way if you were trying to do things quickly, it wasn't anything other than pretty, and so I'd find myself switching quickly back to “Classic”. With Windows 7 there's some new features that might just keep it turned on. Firstly “Snap” which is something i'll use all the time. Grab a window and move your mouse to the right of the screen and your window snaps to fill half your desktop – grab another and move to the left of the screen and it snaps to fill the other half, perfect for moving files or comparing folders. This would be even better if there was a shortcut key command that did it for the last two touched windows, but hey. The other one I love is “Shake” where you grab a window and shake it and all other windows minimise – I find it really helpful when I need to focus on a particular window and want to lose the clutter. The thumbnail previews are also part of the Aero interface so there's actually some good reasons to keep it on. So far i've disabled all the fading in and out stuff as for me that just makes the system feel laggy. How this will affect audio performance is something we'll look at in another article.

Plugging into a network also appeared to be very easy and automatically sets up a network with other Windows 7 machines via a password – connect each one up and you can share anything you like. I hate networks, always have, oh the hours spent fighting to get multiplayer Quake to work, or just wishing I could simply transfer some files – this however seems really easy and once i've got Windows 7 installed on the telly I'll see how that goes.

There's tons more stuff in there obviously but these are the things that i'm coming across in my day-to-day - I'm liking it all so far.

Installing Software

Before I can officially move over to this machine as my working computer there's a few key applications I need running some of which are not officially supported in Windows 7.

1. Mozilla Firefox – installed, no problems.
2. Mozilla Thunderbird – installed, no problem. Transferring emails across was a little traumatic but I managed it in the end – why don't email programs have a simple “inbox” any more? I tried used MozBackup (http://mozbackup.jasnapaka.com/) but it didn't bring over all the accounts for some reason, however it worked excellently on moving bookmarks and history for Firefox. In the end I just copied the Default folder from my old computer to the new – job done.
3. OpenOffice – installed, no problems.
4. Quickbooks Pro 2006 – this is accountancy software and very important to my day to day running of things. It wasn't supposed to work in Vista, but it did, but this is likely to be troublesome, and it was. Installed ok but crashed immediately when I try to run it. Right-click the shortcut and chose “Troubleshoot compatibility” and this little assistant comes up and runs some tests and decides that “XP Compatibility Mode” is the best choice and asks me if I want to give it a go – sure, why not and up comes Quickbooks. There are a couple of glitches to do with it's use of javascript but nothing vital. I confirm it works and it saves the settings and Windows generates an unmistakable air of smugness. It was all too easy.
5. Photoshop 7 – This one wouldn't install off the CD so I found the installer and right-clicked to troubleshoot, this time it asked me if it has run succesfully on an earlier version of Windows, and I had, on Vista and so I selected to run it in Vista Compatibility mode – worked fine.
6. Dreamweaver 4 – I know, I really should buy some recent software. This installed no problems at all.
7. Avast AntiVirus – installed, no problems.
8. HP Printer – had to run the installer in Vista compatibility mode – works, no problems.
9. Steam – installed without problems. The only issue is with transferring saved games. With “The Clone Wars – Republic Heroes” I cannot work out how to transfer my progress to the new machine – so infuriatingly I might have to start from scratch, which is a shame because it's not a bad game and i'm into finishing it but I not sure it's good enough to have to do the first half all over again.
10. Napster – installed, no problems.
11. Picasa 3 – installed, no problems.
12. Second Life – installed, no problems.
13. Tweetdeck – installed, no problems.

So even with some old bits of crumbly software Windows 7 tackled them all and intelligently solved any issues. I've now made the switch to Windows 7.

Next time I'll look at installing the music hardware and software and see what issues this throws up and how the performance stacks up to Vista and XP.