Windows 7 Upgrade Makes Some PCs Unusable
Some PCs are stuck in an infinite PC reboot loop following Windows 7 upgrade attempt.
As is standard M.O. with any new version of Windows, a clean install is best. But clean installs are time consuming as they'd require back ups and reformats and installs and reinstalls and configurations. For some, just doing an upgrade is the preferred way.
Supposedly, the upgrade from Windows Vista to 7 is the most straightforward yet, thanks to the similarity in underlying software. Unfortunately, some users are finding out that the upgrade to Windows 7 could have disastrous, crippling effects.
Participants in a Microsoft support forum are now posting in a thread titled, "Windows 7 - Install Message - Upgrade Unsuccessful." The first poster detailed his or her problem:
"Hello, I purchased Windows 7 Home Premium 32-bit. I am attempting to upgrade from Windows Vista Home Premium 32-bit. On the last step of the upgrade (transferring files/programs/etc), my laptop rebooted and came to a screen telling me the upgrade was unsuccessful and my previous OS files would now be restored. My laptop is now in what seems to be a loop of restarting and trying to restore the files.
"Each copy of Windows I have are genuine (not pirated or anything), and I ran the Windows 7 Upgrade Compatibility Advisor and received no warnings from it before attempting to upgrade. My laptop meets the minimum requirements for upgrade."
Now other users are reporting the same type of problem, though there hasn't yet been a commonality other than trying to upgrade. Some users are upgrading using retail, pressed media, while others are using the installer files from Digital River's $29 student offer.
So far the problem only seems to affect a very small number of users, but Microsoft still has yet to find a solution. One Microsoft support engineer suggested to those who had to burn their own discs from images to use the slowest write speed as possible to avoid corruption.
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So what? Something got corrupted while the install was occuring. Not an unlikely occurance especially on a aging laptop. The huge clue being the upgrade failed and attempted to restore. It's very hard to pin this kind of thing down to a fault with microsoft, not a scratched disk or a i/o error.
upgraded from vista Ultimate to 7 ultimate and now performance is very slow with random system hangs for 30-60 seconds. IE causes most problems
didnt upgrade, did a fresh install and have had no problems apart from a few minor glitches with IE8.
this should be sorted soon through an update, so cant moan as it is still usable.
Come on everybody. Fresh install. Not upgrade. It's rule 1.01. Just back up your shit, take some notes on your setup and install from scratch.
rule 1.02 - Wait a while so other people can find the problems and get the patches. I'm not too sure I'll wait for SP1; but I can wait a month just to see what goes wrong.
For the techies out there, it's very obvious that backing up your entire user profile, (especially including the appdata folder) and backing up some of your program files folders (some of which contain settings), can enable you to be back up and running after a few installer runs, copy-pastes and 10 minutes in the Control Panel.
It's potentially faster than an upgrade since you spend less time trying to find a myriad of plugins and deeply hidden settings you love to enable.
I've been using the same Opera setup (with incremental upgrades) for like 2 years because I always backup my appdata folder when fresh installing.
But, sadly for the average user this is basically an impossible task.
I upgraded from Vista 64 Ultimate to Win7 64 Ultimate with only one issue (vmware), which in all fairness was highlighted as a potential compatability issue during the upgrade. Naturally I backed up beforehand, but I did an upgrade just to see if it worked or not.
Overall I'm very pleased. This upgrade was a lot better than an upgrade from XP to Vista - that was a big pile of steaming brown smelly stuff.
I tried Windows 7 professional custom install over Windows XP. The upgrade was not successfull and entered the rebooting loop. My original XP could not start either.
I had to re-install XP and then 7, which finally installed OK.
Perhaps a third option is not to perform any upgrade at all, but make it look like you are doing an upgrade.
What Windows could do is analyse the system and try to detect all the currently installed programs then compile a list for the user. The installer could contain an extensive database of all commonly used programs with links to the download locations for these programs. Then all apps that are free etc. could be downloaded and installed automatically. Other commercial apps could simply prompt from the appropriate install disc which hopefully the user still has and provide an option to skip if not.
At the end of the installation a report could be generated showing what could be installed and what couldn't so the user knows what they need to do in order to get back to where they were originally.
Of course in the case of machines with a restore partition this isn't going to work but it will perhaps get a good deal of their stuff back up and running automatically from a fresh install.
@Dame: You already can do that. The new Easy Transfer makes a list of the programs you have with info for donwload.
http://content.techrepublic.com.co [...] 37-17.html
IMO the worse of a clean install is the input of key serials.