So Windows 7 is out, and the copy of Home Premium, for my girlfriend’s netbook, showed up today. I was excited, hey I’m a geek, to get this setup, and was really curious to see how painful an upgrade from XP Home to Windows 7 Home Premium would be. I played nice and did the upgrade according to Microsoft’s steps, with only 1 minor change.

I started by downloading the Windows Easy Transfer utility. It was a quick download and install, and is pretty simple to use. It’s purpose is to make a backup, proprietary .MIG format, of your “important” data. By default this includes any user directories on the system, plus the shared folders. The netbook doesn’t have a whole lot going on, other than a small iTunes library so the scan portion of the utility was pretty quick. It found around 6.8 GB if data to backup, the afforementioned user directory was small, but the iTunes folder linked to from “My Music” was around 5GB alone. The interface lets you customize the backup, remove some folders add others, right down to files. The next step in the process is to tell the utility where you want to put the backup. I was provided 3 options, USB Easy Transfer Cable, Network Connection, External Drive or USB Drive. There is a 4th option to use a CD/DVD burner, which I believe was not shown as I did not have one attached. I don’t have an “Easy Transfer Cable”, I didn’t know such a thing existed honestly. My plan was to send the backup to my desktop across my home network. When I tried to that however I found the program did not allow anything other than an IP, and it did not like me trying to access the share for some reason. This could be my fault, my experience with networking between XP and Vista has been nothing short of a nightmare. With that option exhausted I decided to cheat. I mapped a network drive to the share, and put the backup there. It was no big deal, just a little odd that the “Network Location” option did not seem to like the share. Once I selected that, the program started doing it’s thing, and about 45 minutes later I had a 6 GB .MIG file on my computer. I would like to have seen some sort of compression on this, and maybe the program would run better if it made the backup, then transferred it to the storage location, but I am not Microsoft, I am sure they had they reason for doing it this way ;) With the backup safely on my desktop, I deviated from the Microsoft steps. I made my own backups as well. I copied basically the same thing the Transfer tool did, but as I have never used this tool, and know how backups can fail, I wanted to be sure I did not lose my girlfriend’s music. Girlfriend aggro is never a good thing, even more so when I ran an upgrade she never asked for :)

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