IT Expert Voice

The official word from Microsoft is you can’t upgrade from Windows XP to Windows 7; you need a clean install. But in fact you can upgrade, including moving your data, applications, and settings. Here are some tips to help.

With Microsoft having abandoned Windows XP SP2, late-adopting companies still using XP are being pushed to make the upgrade to Windows 7. Windows XP is a dying breed.  It’s time to upgrade. Microsoft says only Windows Vista systems are eligible to upgrade, while Windows XP users need to make a clean install of the new operating system:

You can’t directly upgrade from Windows XP to Windows 7, says Microsoft.

Thankfully, you can avoid the need to wipe the disk of each PC and clean-install Windows 7 manually.  Some tricks are more effective than others. Let’s look at some of these upgrade options, the DO’s and DON’Ts, and pick the slickest (and cheapest) and method.
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If your Windows 7 systems need half an eternity to boot up, there’s clearly something odd going on. Dealing with slow boot problems is annoying and – let’s face it – is mostly guesswork. Guesswork that costs money and time. We have got you covered: Learn how to analyze the startup process, find the cause in no time, and get rid of bottlenecks once and for all!

Windows 7 is a fast beast, especially when it comes to its startup process which was optimized dramatically compared to Windows Vista. No wonder, as Microsoft has a dedicated team focusing strictly on startup performance. And it shows: On one- to two-year-old hardware, Windows 7 usually takes only 20 to 40 seconds to boot up. Even the performance-wise challenged netbooks rarely need more than a minute to be ready for work!

Certainly, boot times vary significantly from one computer to another. This is nothing new. But if Windows 7 clients need way longer – and we’re talking way over one or two minutes – then you’re looking at a resource hog. So what could be causing the problem?

• You just installed a new driver, which hasn’t been WHQL-certified and delays the boot up process. It could be a simple driver bug!
• You installed a piece of resource-intense software that initializes a process or a service during startup.
• You updated existing software or Windows 7 itself. Yes, it’s not unheard of that some updates cause a significant boot delay.

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The era of mechanical hard disks lasted for decades. Now it’s over. Extremely fast and energy-saving solid state disks are entering the stage. But the ‘90s rules of storage maintenance, like a casual round of Defrag, don’t apply anymore. In fact, treating an SSD as a regular hard disk might be potentially harmful. Learn how Windows 7 treats these new storage devices and what common SSD myths you need to avoid.

They’re silent, contain no moving parts, consume less energy, and everyone who has installed one of the recently released Solid State Drives (SSDs) notices dramatic speed improvements.

SSDs are a major advance in technology; how they work and if they’re useful in your infrastructure is greatly explained in the article, Switch from a Hard Disk to an SSD with Little Fuss and Bother. A look at today’s segmentation in the SSD market is found over at Anandtech. Study these guides carefully to see if solid state technology is a feasible solution for your enterprise environment.

Whether you upgraded all PCs (or servers) to SSD or just deployed computers with SSDs preinstalled, there are a couple of new house rules to consider. And there’s tons of bad advice floating around that you need to avoid, as well. In this guide, I show you how to set Windows 7 for SSD and what settings you should stay far away from. READ MORE

You want your clients to automatically clean themselves up? You need a program to start at a specific time? You want the PC to automatically send you an e-mail message in case a crash occurs? Windows 7’s built in “Task Scheduler” can automate almost everything you want (except automatically get you coffee). Here’s how it works. READ MORE

Minimalists beware: Having a solid-color background on your Windows 7 client PCs causes an extremely slow logon of up to 30 seconds. Read all about the problem and get three helpful solutions.
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If things go wrong in Windows 7 and the OS fails to boot, don’t fret. There’s a good chance you can repair the PC with only a couple of clicks, using the built-in Windows Recovery Environment (WinRE). This article teaches you how it works. READ MORE