Upgrading to Windows 7 with a Sony Vaio VGC JS030J?

For the last two weeks I've been having computer problems. First my antivirus and anti-spyware program let a critter through, which did enough damage to bring my Vista system to a slow crawl. After removing it, things were a little better until the operating system somehow got corrupted. Now we were back to the slow crawl. I wasted days trying to still use the system, until it slowed down so much that it took 5 hours to do a 2 hour back-up. Holding that $49 deal on upgrading to Windows 7 in my hand, I decided to upgrade.

Unlike 'normal' users, we have about 20 programs on the main desktop that are used very frequently. This translates to a lot of reinstalling, re-downloads, looking for registration codes, and where the data ends up being restored someplace else, searching not for Nemo but for a few databases and reconnecting them to their programs. I decided to save time and try to do an operating system upgrade. Having had absolutely no problems whatsoever when I did an O/S upgrade to XP back in the day, I was unprepared for the sheer torture that doing a Win 7 upgrade would bring me.

If you are planning to upgrade, the first thing you should do is run the Windows 7 Advisor.

It will tell you whether your system is upgradable and where the obvious problems may be. I had done this in advance of my purchasing the software during Microsoft's $49 deal, so I was reasonably assured that the upgrade would work. I uninstalled the suspected offending programs and attempted to do the upgrade. When you are doing this with a system that is already not working very well, it's anticlimactic to finally get to a screen that tells you that you need to remove more programs. I removed those, rebooted and attempted try number 2. I received more error messages, to remove two programs specific to the Sony Vaio. I removed the one I could find under Add/Remove Programs. The other, which I knew existed based on the startup menus that popped up, I could not find under Add/Remove. I called Sony.

If you want to avoid a call to Sony, go to the Sony esupport website, fill in your model number and current operating system, and go to the drivers section. Look for Sony Applications drivers and download the Applications Uninstaller Software. This will remove all the Sony programs that interfere with an upgrade.

I was hoping that the third time would be the charm, but it was not to be. In my fatigue, I forgot to disable my anti-virus software, which is a known culprit in interfering with this upgrade. Okay, try number 4 was initiated. Tired of staying up till 2 AM every night, I went to sleep, and in the morning I saw that there were no error messages on my computer. There was also no upgrade. With no error message, it was obvious that a system upgrade was going to be more time that it is worth.

During my online research, I came across one person who attempted a Vista to Win7 upgrade 10 times before landing on the moon successfully. Upgrades on normally running systems take about 5-6 hours. Since I already had attempted this four times, I was not about to go about it another time, especially without the benefit of a system error that would give some useful information.

If you do a clean install, it will take you between 1.5 and 2 hours. This one took 1.5 hours and on a system that was running painfully slow. The upside of this is that the system is clean, and has none of the pieces that Vista would leave behind. The downside is that I now had a lot of programs to reinstall and a lot of registration numbers to look for where the software is downloaded.

I lost about 3 days trying to do a Win upgrade, and 3 more days reloading software. I have one more day to go before most of it is back to usability. Two major disappointments were the HP wifi printer, which will not have a 'fix' until the end of January 2010. Since HP also has newer printers that also claim to work with Win7, it seems just too coincidental that they still haven't provided a solution for their HP Deskjet 6988 users.

The other major disappointment was when the EyeQ eye exercise program could not install, since a warning window came up that the drivers would damage the O/S and cause the system to become unstable. I called the customer service number on the CD only to wait for nearly 15' to talk to someone, who was far from customer service focused and very defensive about their programs working on Win7. She could not provide any tech support since she wasn't a technical person, and claimed there was no one else there who could. One would think that if you sell software, you should provide technical support. I asked if there was anyone in the company who was technical and she said she'd contact them, but did not cc me if she did indeed put the request through. It's times like this that I think I should only order from Zappos, a company that excels in company service and solutions.

Back to installing Win7. After numerous calls to the Philippines (I must know everyone on staff there by now), my suggestion would be to call Sony and have them send you their version of the Win7 upgrade. You'll probably save yourself a lot of extra steps, since their upgrades would be designed for their computers. Even after my system was successfully upgraded via a clean install, I had to call to find out how to get the keyboard functionality back.

www.noteshamps.com

Upgrading to Windows 7 with a Sony Vaio VGC JS030J?

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