MrDave's (David Yack) Blog!

That’s a decision many of you will be making in the future if you haven’t already.  I’ve done both already and have had success with both approaches.  I’m not sure there’s a single right answer to which choice you should make.  I can tell you from past experience I tend to favor the re-pave as there’s just something about having a fresh install.  On one of my machines, my main office computer, I decided to do the upgrade.  Why you ask?  It’s one I don’t put any beta software on and it’s the cleanest of all my computers. Yeah I have a few.

The upgrade was smooth, but not nearly as fast as a fresh install of the base Windows 7 OS.  I’m not a time person so I didn’t get the stop watch out and watch, but I’d say if your doing an upgrade it took about an hour and a half to finish.  I would advise if your doing an upgrade to set aside 3-4 hours just in case you hit some snags.  Since I have multiple computers,. I’m not as worried if the upgrade had problems because I would just use another one.  So if you only have one, take the time to get a good backup of your current system in case things go way wrong.

Installing from a bootable USB is the way to go if you ask me…. My laptops don’t have DVD drives because with 16, 32 and 64gb flash drives who needs a 4gb DVD that’s easily broken when you travel.  In fact before now the only reason I would carry my external DVD player around was to re-install should the world end while I’m traveling.  Now with Windows 7 , I used made a bootable USB using this utility here.  That will shave another pound off my travel bag!  So far this has worked great and flash drives offer such good read performance the installs just fly.  I’m not sure you can finish a cup of coffee anymore for the base Widows 7 installation.

So back to Upgrade vs. Re-Pave.  Upgrades nice because all your stuff is just there still.  After the upgrade finishes and the reboot is done you login and no more work is required.  In some ways I think this is like real estate – some people buy a house and paint the walls pink, and put up all kinds of wall paper.  They invest a lot of time making small tweaks to make it feel like home.  Other people, just leave the walls alone knowing if they ever sell it’s less work in the future.  For me, I don’t do a lot of those tweaks because I’m always re-installing.  So for people that do a lot of “wall painting” you might want to consider upgrading because you don’t have to re-do the tweaks.  So if you have a pretty clean PC with out any beta software or other odd stuff that you’ve installed – give upgrade a try – worse case you can always do a re-pave if you don’t like what you get!

So why just re-pave?  It’s like cars  some people will drive a car till it stops running, others will swap it out ever few years.  For a Windows install the same is true – some only rebuild when they get a new computer, others are constantly rebuilding.  For me,like the new car, I like the freshness that a new install has.  It’s a quick way to dump all the junk you no longer need.  I only install things I’m actively using so I end up with a streamlined install – no bloat you get when you upgrade and carry along those wonderful things you installed and only used once. 

If your doing a re-pave the actual install of Windows 7 plus Microsoft Office goes really quick.  Where things slow down is if your a developer getting Visual Studio 2008 and SQL 2008 all setup.  In fact, the slowest part is the service packs to both of those.  You have the actual Visual Studio 2008 SP1 that must install, then once those are installed expect almost 1Gb of follow on updates that come down through windows update.  Visual Studio SP1 I think takes almost 4 times as long as Windows (remember my disclaimer I don’t pay attention to time, but it sure seems like forever) to install.  I always recommend not doing a fresh install when you plan to go on the road soon because you will find that you trickle install things over the next few days.  Even when I make a list of things I use all the time sure enough I forget something stupid like Adobe PDF Reader.

Finally, you will notice the title wasn’t Windows 7 Upgrade, Repave or “Don’t bother looking at Windows 7” so you can assume my recommendation is to move to Windows 7 when it becomes available to you.  I’ve been running it on all but one of my machines during the beta and couldn’t be more happy.  As to my favorite feature?  The fact that when you hit “Sleep” it just sleeps, and when you open the lid on your laptop it just flashes on with out delay.

So what’s are you going to do upgrade or repave, or what did you do and how did it work?