Yesterday I upgraded from Win Vista to Win 7. The process itself takes quite a while, but is quite smooth. All your settings and and programs will be preserved. (Doing a backup before upgrading is recommended, though)
My windows partition was quite full before the upgrade. You need 16GB of free space for the upgrade. It was quite a struggle to free so much space. To my suprise after the upgrade 33GB of 70GB were free. So Win 7 seams to need less HD space. All drivers work after the upgrade. I didn’t have to install any new. Well exept one.. the tap driver. It is needed to create virtual network interface cards. This might render openvpn unsable. We’ll see in october when I need openvpn to access the internet inside the university. But I will probably use my Ubuntu there…so who cares?
Ok there is another problem concerning the ext drivers, which allow me to access partitions of my linux installation(and my external HD). You can install them in windows vista compatibilty mode. But upon reboot the partitions will be gone and you have to reinstall the drivers. This could get quite annoying. But well… I’m planning to build a fileserver, so that windows can access my external HD via SMB. To sum up:
- smooth upgrade procedure from win vista to win 7
- win7 needs less HD space
- win tap drivers not working
- ext drivers not fully working