Tempted to Upgrade to Win7 RC Soon - Any Tips?

I would be going to Windows 7 x64 from Vista SP2 using the in-place upgrade method. I'm just curious about a few things.

1. What's the backup system like in Win7? I run a weekly Complete PC Backup through Vista, but if I want/need to run a backup of Win7, will that overwrite my Vista backup?
2. What about device drivers? Will the ones I have in Vista be kept?
3. Has anyone had any problems doing the in-place upgrade?

 

I ahve never done an in place upgrade as I have been a fan of clean loading for years, but the backup is superb, and device drivers are good as well as you can use drivers from vista OR XP, some times you have to force them but the only thing I have yet to get working on over 50 machines is an old AD 1881 sound card

 

Vista drivers should work just fine. I converted my Vista Ultimate x64 setup to Win 7 completely with drivers I used on Vista.

However, I've found that Win 7 has excellent driver support. When I changed from Beta to RC, I let 7 do the dirty work...installed almost every driver w/o a fuss.

ON the in-place upgrade, I've never done one, as I can't stand having old bloat on a new OS-install.

Good luck.

 

i'm also very tempted to do this
is there going to be a way to upgrade from RC to the final version?

 

AFAIK, you need to a clean install from RC to final whether you have retail or the upgrade version. If you have the upgrade version, you'll need to have a legit copy of Windows (not the RC) you can use to verify the upgrade.

 

k, thanks
also, seeing as how i'll have to do a clean install, should i go with 64bit or 32bit (i have 3GB ram, no plans to add more)

 

I personally like 64-bit, but if you're not planning on adding more RAM, then go with 32-bit. You'll have no worries of incompatibilities (64-bit has almost none anymore, but there are a few things still) and the performance difference isn't great enough to go for 64-bit with only 3 GB of RAM.

 

So if I want to keep all my programs installed (had some activation issues with Office last clean install), I should just wait until Win 7 RTM is released and upgrade then.
Thanks!
EDIT: Well, curiosity might get the better of me tonight - I'll just make sure that I keep my Vista Complete PC Backup for when I want to return to normality.

 

Or you could use CloneZilla to do a mirror image of your drive, then you won't have to worry about all of the other stuff.

 

So i went for the in-place upgrade... seems to work great on the 6920G
only things i've encountered so far are that NIS2009 is incompatible with Win7 (had to download 2010 beta from their website), and Tages Protection drivers (don't even know why that's on my system) is also incompatible with Win7

everything else appears to work fine
cinedash, quicklaunch buttons, audio, webcam...

i don't know if the fingerprint reader works because i uninstalled it a while ago

edit: vlc doesn't seem to play too nicely with win7, very pixelated. had to enable directx output to fix it, which disables aero when vlc is open

 

I did not realize that one can do an in-place upgrade from Vista to W7 RC

I missed something.

cheers ...

 

I played around with Win7 yesterday. The RC is the Ultimate version. It asked if I wanted a clean install or an upgrade. I choose clean install and said the old OS will be filed as 'windows.old' I used an unused HDD with original programs on it (Windows XP, this was an experiment after all). The installation was fast. First impression was positive but then I realized the GUI wasn't much different from Vista Ultimate. One thing I do miss was it didn't have the option for 'classic view' in Control Panel. All drivers loaded without a hitch. Specialized hardware drivers still have to be loaded from the manufacturer's web site. I have Vista Ultimate with SP2 and will be staying with it since I don't see spending $312 for Windows 7 Ultimate when it comes out. I might change my mind if there's a feature that really stands out!

 

1) Classic View = View by "Small Icons"
2) It was my understanding it wouldn't cost that much, especially if they go through with the "Family Pack":
http://lifehacker.com/5302482/windows-7-will-cost-less-than-vista
http://blogs.zdnet.com/Bott/?p=1145

Windows 7 pwns

 

Loving it so far - I'd switch over to it on a permanent basis if I knew that I could do an in-place upgrade to an RTM version.
But I can't, so back to Vista SP2 next weekend.