Through my university’s membership in the MSDNAA program, I acquired Windows 7 Professional for free! Whoo! I backed up my laptop yesterday onto my external hard drive (took up 16gb) and am installing Windows 7 now (which takes about 16gb!), wiping out everything. Hopefully it goes well.
Started around 5:45 or so.
Update 5:50pm – I reformatted my hard drive using the disk utility in the install dvd but was unable to create and resize partitions, which kinda sucks, since I was planning on keeping a separate partition for my OS and for my data. Maybe I can do it after finishing the installation, using the Disk Management Tool? Maybe?
Update 6:05pm (ish) – Done! Now configuring computer settings.
Update 6:10pm (ish) – Windows Update running.
Update the next day – All is working fine and all of the important and relevant files in my life today have been migrated over from my external. I had some annoyances with partitioning but I think it will be okay. The new directory structure and windows explorer sidebar is going to take a little getting used to from XP. The jump lists are pretty cool, and I will probably spend a good chunk of today reading through the many Lifehacker posts on the cool new features in Windows 7. I’ll also be trying to keep my desktop clean and clutter-free as well! Only the recycle bin and very temporarily relevant/important files will be there. I hope I can keep that up. Overall, Windows 7 is pretty sleek and a nice upgrade from XP. I haven’t tried any of the new functionality yet, but appearance- and usability-wise, I like it.
Update the morning after the next day – It seems that adding shortcuts to a folder in the Start Menu is difficult when not logged in as an administrator. I tried to create a shortcut to CCleaner in a new CCleaner folder I made in the Start Menu programs folder, but Windows said it could not be done and asked me if I wanted to make one on the Desktop first. I said yes and it did so after prompting for the admin password, and then I moved the Desktop shortcut into the CCleaner folder in the Start Menu programs folder. It worked (with admin password) and created a new shortcut there. I made sure that the new shortcut pointed to the original .exe file and then deleted the one on the Desktop.
It’s weird that I had to use the Desktop as an intermediate copy area in order to create the shortcut; it probably has to do with problems requiring admin permission for more than one step of the process or creating a shortcut from an admin-only area to an admin-only area. I never used a non-administrator account with XP so I don’t know how that worked before, but this is kinda odd. By the way, I am using a non-admin account for an extra level of security, as recommended by Coding Horror.