Windows 7 arrived on the scene the latter part of October and, of course, Microsoft wants all of current Microsoft users to quickly move to the newest operating system. If you have Vista the task is slightly easier as you can get an upgrade disk thet will make the process fairly easy. Some of you even bought Vista and the store you bought it from was going to give you the upgrade disks for Windows 7.

However, many of us still clung to our old reliable Windows XP OS because perhaps our computer lacked the horsepower to make the switch, we were comfortable and reluctant to change or we had heard many of the difficult problems that Vista users had. In any case by not following the Microsoft route and now wanting to make the transition from XP to Windows 7 we must make a clean install to upgrade. Clean installs are nice except all the data that existed on your old hard drive would be overwritten with the new operating system and most computer users have not had any experience with switching operating systems. Before you start, you want to do three things.

1. Run the Windows 7 upgrade adviser. It will let you know if your computer can handle any version of Windows 7.

2. Check the Windows 7 compatibility center. This is different than the upgrade adviser. It will tell you if you need to update your drivers or apps to make them work in 7.

3. Make a copy of your hard drive, just in case things go horribly wrong. The best choice of a backup location is a separate hard drive. A separate 500GB external hard drive is around $100. Here are a few choices.

A good piece of software to use is the FREE version of Macrium Reflect . It is a backup and disk imaging software program for Microsoft Windows developed by Paramount Software UK Ltd in 2006. It creates disk images and file backup archives using Microsoft Volume Shadow Copy Service to ensure 'point in time' data accuracy. (A step by step process of using this software is at the end of the article. Click here)

Having completed the steps above, you are ready to go purchase your new Windows 7. You go ahead and purchase the box containing Windows 7.

As soon as you open the box you are surprised to find the box contains, not one, but two disks - Windows 7 for 32 bit configurations and a second disk for 64 bit configurations. There is the "Oh, My god, what if I do something wrong!" fear. Now you are faced with a decision and you must find out which disk to use.

Somewhere you read an article that Windows architecture is moving from 32 bit to 64 bit. The 32 or 64 bit architecture refers to the memory address length that can be referenced by the processor. This also has an impact on the maximum amount of memory that can be utilized, which is 4GB for a 32 bit CPU. Having a 64 bit OS doesn’t automatically make all applications faster because much of today’s software is written and optimized for a 32 bit era. You have many older programs that you suspect will not run on the newer 64 bit architecture so you decide to play it safe and go with the 32 bit version of Windows 7. Good choice!! Save upgrading to 64 bit until you purchase a new computer somewhere down the road.

OK, we've checked out system for compatibility and decided to use the 32 bit disk for our upgrade to Windows 7. We have made an image of our old Windows XP by following the tutorial below. Now we must make a choice of saving our old files and the programs that we've installed over the lifetime of owning Windows XP.

Choice #1 -One way to go would be to start by gathering all the installation files for all your applications. Windows 7 will put your data in a Windows.old file for you, but it won't reinstall your apps. Make sure you have all the CDs or if you downloaded programs, back up any install files you have on an external drive. Also don't forget to gather all the license keys either off product boxes or from e-mails. You'll want them all handy in a place outside the computer you're upgrading.

The last thing before we get to the actual Windows 7 disc is to download and run the Windows Easy Transfer Wizard. This will allow you to back up all your files and settings to an external hard drive. A different one than the one you imaged earlier. Launch the wizard and make sure your external drive is plugged in. You can send your data to this external drive. You shouldn't use your computer while this process is running. It will take a while to move all your data over. Once it's done, you can set that drive aside.

Now insert the Windows 7 32 bit disk into the computer. When doing a clean install, it doesn't matter if you restart and boot off the disc or just run it from within Windows. It will give you one last chance to check compatibility. If you're sure you don't need that, go ahead and click "Install now." Choose Custom install. With XP, if you choose upgrade, the installation will fail. A warning box will alert you that you're going to lose your old version of Windows and your old files will be saved in C:/Windows.old And Windows will commence installing.

Your computer will reboot a few times and eventually the Wizard will return, this time running in Windows 7. At this point, you'll be able to do things like set up a password, set security preferences, set time and date, etc.

Choice #2 - If you want to save a lot of this hassle, you can get a program that will move all your data and your installed applications for you. The PCMover Windows 7 upgrade assistant from Laplink costs around $30. It will restore all your data and programs again without you needing to do any dragging and dropping or gathering of discs and license keys.

Final Step - Whichever choice you make, once you're done, do one last thing. Image your drive again with Macrium Reflect so you have a backup of your new Windows 7 machine.

Finally, you're running Windows 7! You may have device driver issues. Launch the device manager by pressing Start and typing Device Manager in the search box. If you see yellow exclamation points, those devices have driver issues. The easiest way to fix them is to double-click the item, then click the update driver button. Select Search automatically for updated driver software.

And there you have it. You have followed these steps and found out how easy it is to upgrade your system and you now have a separate hard drive which you can use to keep a backup copies from now on.

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Tutorial

How To Create a Disk Image with Macrium Reflect

Macrium Reflect is an award winning backup solution for Windows XP and Vista. Reflect has some innovative features designed to make the chore of protecting your PC a little easier.

Create a Disk Image with Macrium Reflect

by Annette McGrath

Creating an image of your hard disk is the best way to protect your data and operating system from disk failure or accidental deletion of critical system files. Fortunately, with Macrium Reflect this process is not only incredibly fast but also extremely easy.

Macrium Reflect can create file backups as well as disk images. However, for this tutorial I'll take you through the steps required to create a full image of 'Drive C' using the backup image wizard. After completing these steps you will have created an image and saved your options as a XML definition file for easy re-running.

XML definitions provide a convenient way to store your backup options. Using an XML definition you can schedule a backup, generate a VBScript file for complex scenarios or simply create a desktop shortcut for instant running of your backup by clicking the shortcut icon.

OK, let's begin!

Start Reflect and take the option "Create a backup image" to start the backup wizard.
Click "Next" on the first introductory wizard page. On the second wizard page, select "Full" as the image type and click "Next"
The next page shows your disk partitions (drives). You can save multiple partitions from multiple disks in the same image file but for this example click drive (C:) in your list then click "Next"
You now need to select where you want to store your image file.
Reflect can store images on one or many DVDs but it is far better to choose a local or network drive. By using a local or network drive you can easily access your image files for restoring and you can browse your images in Windows explorer. This isn't possible if the image file spans more than one DVD.

It's best to create a new directory for your images. Click the dropdown list for "Local Hard Disk" and select "Browse for folder". This opens a standard windows directory selection dialog. Navigate to the drive where you want to store the image file and click the "Make New Folder" button. Name this folder something meaningful, such as "Drive C Images" and click "OK" in the dialog to select it.

Leave the "Use image ID as the file name" option checked and click "Next".

An image ID is used to identify a backup set. A backup set comprises of a full backup and all subsequent Incremental and/or differential backups. It is a unique 16 byte Hex value (128 bit) and guarantees that you won't have any file name conflicts when creating multiple backups in the same directory.
The final page shows a summary of your selections. The "Advanced" button allows you to configure compression level, password / encryption and many other options. For this example we'll just leave them as the defaulted values and click "Finish"
You now have the option to save this definition and / or run this image now. Change the file name to "C Full Image", leave both options checked and click "OK".

That's it! Your backup will now start and you have saved the definition of this backup as "C Full Image.xml".

To re-run this backup simply select the XML definition and click the "Execute" button.

You can also create a desktop shortcut to run the backup by clicking the shortcut icon. Simply click the "Create Desktop Shortcut" button

In the next tutorial we'll create an incremental image of this full image and schedule these to run automatically to keep your PC protected.

About Annette McGrath
Annette is a senior programmer at Paramount Software UK Ltd. She has been responsible for much of the coding and design of Macrium Reflect and has many years experience in software design and C, C++ programming languages.