Author Topic: did clean install of windows 7 and still smiling  (Read 1483 times)

Offline frustrated granny

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did clean install of windows 7 and still smiling
« on: November 12, 2009, 07:36:04 PM »
Although the installation info at www. windows.microsoft.com/upgrade-windows-vista is really clear and easy to follow I did encounter several decision points that javajolt and his colleagues at this windows 7 forum helped with enormously.  And at each juncture they were there to cheer me on and provide support.  We have an old computer that I was able to use to connect to the internet during this process.  Mega kudos!

We have a HP laptop Pavillion dv9640us purchased in 2007 which came with vista installed.

Upgrade vs custom install:
My 79 year old hubby was running the windows 7RC which added an extra glitch to the process.
Our attempt to revert to the factory setting for vista failed from both the recovery partition and the recovery disk that we had. (false sense of security here!) So hubby rushed off to exchange the upgrade for a retail version of windows 7 to perform a clean install. (waiting for the $15 recovery disk for vista from HP wasn’t really an option.)

File Backup:
Fortunately I had used windows transfer to backup our profiles onto a second hard drive. It was a snap to use and I didn’t appreciate it fully until I had to transfer these files and setting back to the primary hard drive.  After the installation of windows 7, it restored EVERYTHING to it’s proper place for our 2 profiles including windows live mail accounts (6), settings, messages and contacts.  All the HP pre-installed software was saved in a swsetup file that allowed me to choose which of these we wanted to reinstall.

Reinstall Programs;
I had chosen the 32bit version after discussion with javajolt since our programs are fairly old. The reinstall of our programs from disc was going smoothly until I noticed that the primary hard drive was showing only 24GB of space instead of the 103 GB that I was sure were there!  I went to the disk manager and found  the 79GB unallocated on the disk.

Back to the Windows Trouble Help forum.  Encouraged, I returned to the disk manager and easily extended the disk space to reclaim these bites.

These re-installs did take several hours to accomplish but were uneventful.

Drivers:
After our programs were installed, I went to the device manager to make sure the proper drivers were installed and found a few that I had to download especially the NVIDIA display driver.

Clean Up:
I’ll wait a few days before I do the clean up, backup and I will create the recovery on the partition and on a DVD -- just in case.

Don’t know if I would have tried this without the support and help of the technical support from this forum.  Thanks a million!

Offline Jake

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Re: did clean install of windows 7 and still smiling
« Reply #1 on: November 12, 2009, 09:49:15 PM »
Glad to hear we at the forum were able to assist

-Irtehpasty
There's no place like 127.0.0.1