I should not be typing this. It should not be possible.
I started messing with PCs in the late 80s; my first OS was DOS 2.11. I’ve used several versions of Windows since then, but I was a Vista-hater; I stayed with XP. I actually chose my laptop primarily because it came with XP Pro while most machines with shipping with Vista. But when I heard about Windows 7, I was pretty excited. I put RC1 on a netbook just to see for myself. Then I preordered three copies of Home Premium at a deep discount (one for Kat’s gaming PC, two for my machines), hopeful that this time, it would be different.
Well…it’s different. I’m writing this on my laptop, which now features Windows 7 on it, from a fresh install replacing XP. Then I installed Win7 on two more machines, including my quad-core main rig. It took me more time to back up my data on these machines than it did to install Windows 7 and see it up and running on all of them.
I was prepared for disaster, and I figured that this would take all weekend. Instead, this was, by far, the easiest PC upgrade I have ever done. Microsoft nailed it.
UPDATE: I forgot to mention a few helpful things. My laptop only had 1GB and it still runs Win 7 just fine; I am upgrading to 4GB next week because I’m a power user d00d and I thought I already had more than a gig, but I was a little surprised at how it handled itself with such low memory. I still recommend 2GB for a minimum. AVG Free works fine for virus protection, and even though I backed everything up, I still forgot a few things. So back everything up and then go through visually and check again.