Windows 7 - the story so far

Well, there's good news, and there's bad news.

The good news is that I performed a clean install of Windows 7 on my main (previously Vista) desktop yesterday, and everything went as sweet as a nut (what does that mean?). The actual install took around 20-25 minutes, very impressive, and the new OS recognised everything attached to my PC, including the router and network settings - brilliant.

The backing up of my stuff prior to the upgrade, and the re-nstalling of all programs afterwards is a bit tedious, but I'll take that for the benefit of starting from scratch with a completely virgin OS. It also allows me to ditch a pile of accumulated software that I never use.

Boot up is sprightly as you'd expect, and so far I'm very impressed.

Now the bad news.

I also have an XP box, and I bought another W7 licence to upgrade that system. However, things started to go wrong almost immediately - and mostly because a) I didn't read the instructions and b) I rushed.

On the Vista machine I did a completely clean install - booting from the W7 DVD and allowing the process to wipe my drive (after checking with me).

On the XP box, I planned to do the same - it definitely needed a good wipe. The problem was my W7 version was the "upgrade" for Vista, or "clean install" for XP - but what a clean install apparently means is that you run the DVD from XP and allow the process to take you through a clean install.

Because I'd done a wipe on my Vista box, that's what I did on my XP box - and everything appeared to be going ticketyboo until I got to "Enter your product key". I did, and it told me it was invalid. I checked and entered it again. Smae result. I tried about 6 more times. Same result. I got my son to do it. Same result. Bugger.

Range Amazon, who were very pleasant, but basically said "ring Microsoft". So I did. Eventually, the guy worked out from my muttering what was going on and told me I had to reinstall XP and then run the W7 disk. Ok.

So, I started to re-install XP, but here's where it all went VERY pear shaped. I was now rushing, and when the setup got to the bit where it shows the partitions I deleted everything. Yup - everything. Including the primary partition where you store an OS. Ooops.

You see This drive had several partitions and I wanted to get back to a single partition, so it seemed sensible to do that. But it wasn't.

Anyway, to cut a very long story short and miss out the profanities I was by now muttering, I've managed to swap disks around and get the darn thing installing XP again. I've got bits of computer strewn around as I've switched hard disks, and I'm half way through the XP install.

So far it's taken me about 4 hours and I'm not even back to where I started!

I'll let you know if it works later!