http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GkBr0fxqr9w
Yeh, yeh, I don’t have a T-Bird, but I had fun, fun fun, didn’t I? 😉
What?!?
It’s been a little over a year now since I picked up this lil Asus P50IJ notebook. It’s been really useful for web browsing, email, a few VMs (mostly Linux VMs) and other light computing stuff. Like it. About a month after I bought it, I went ahead and used an extra (perfectly legal, from Technet Plus membership) license for Win7 Ultimate to do “Windows Anytime Upgrade” from the Win7 Home Premium (just two features I wanted, and I ought to have used a Win7 Pro license instead, I guess).
But as with all Windows installs, after a time things became crufted, system files became screwed up, etc. It happens. I use a few techniques and utilities to keep things relatively clean, but… it’s Windows, you know?
So, time for a reinstall. But. I hate backing up (although I do that anyway), wiping, reinstalling Windows, then reinstalling applications, etc. So…
Non-destructive reinstall. Just the ticket, right? Simply pop in the appropriate Windows installation DVD and select Upgrade when the prompt finally loads for Upgrade or Custom Installation. Seems simple enough.
But. For some reason I couldn’t locate a Win7 Ultimate DVD with SP-1 slipstreamed. Notaproblem. Find the appropriate iso and slipstream SP-1. Except… M$ has made it less easy to slipstream Win7 DVDs than in past versions of Windows, so… RT7 Lite to the rescue. Almost. The latest RC of the program won’t slipstream the service pack for Win7. *sigh* But the latest beta will! *heh*
OK, did that. Pop DVD in and… error. *sigh* “Your current version of Windows is more recent than the version you are trying to upgrade to. Windows cannot complete the upgrade.”
*arrggghh!*
OK, tell Windows to run the setup.exe on the newly burned DVD in compatibility mode with Vista SP2. Restart the upgrade process. Works.
Took maybe 12 hours. No kidding. I finally went to bed and let it churn away all night, so I have no idea how many of the 16 hours from when I started it actually took, but given where it was when I left and how long it had taken to get there, I guesstimate 12 hours.
Still, apart from a couple of reboots to catch things up with Windows Update, it’s taken less of my time to reinstall all the system files than if I had to do a wipe and reinstall.
And everything’s right back where it was, except for one niggling little problem I had that I suspected was OS-related but couldn’t run down. It’s gone.
Windows is still, as opposed to ‘nix systems, a PITA to manage and keep clean, but this is at least some improvement.