Upgrading a Mac to Windows 7

ScottM

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iBazinga!
I know we have a lot of Apple fans on this forum. I thought I would share my experience upgrading my Mac to Win7 last night.

I was running a MacBook Pro 15" with VMFussion 2.0 and Windows Vista Home to be able to have Golden Eagle and Jepp update manager capability on my Mac. But with some additional projects I have been working on I needed M$ Access (not available for Mac), M$ Visio and ESRI ArcGIS. This all ran fine on Vista but I figured I might as well upgrade if possible because I can get a cheap upgrade to Win7 through the university.

The first hurdle to breach is that Win7 requires VMFussion 3. I needed upgrade that first. The cost was $9.95 and went pretty well. I did start to have some graphics issues with Vista under VMF3 that I had not had before but with the Win7 upgrade coming as soon as the CD showed up I was not too concerned about troubleshooting.

When the Win7 CD came I looked over the M$ documentation and found it to be woefully unhelpful. M$ just is not looking at the small Mac market as an important enough group to spend a lot of time supporting. I can understand. I did look at the VM forums and found some useful help.

First, without the WinOS running set the VM to be Win7, be ready to reinstall VM tools and just follow the M$ directions. The upgrade from Vista to Win7 is advertised to be super easy. XP to Win7 not so much.

I inserted the CD, after backing up some data, and started to run the upgrade process. All seemed well but I did run into one problem. Vista Home is not eligible for the Win7 Pro update. I would have to run a clean install and that meant reloading software. SIGH, but at least I did not have too much software to reload.

The install took about an hour and went without any hitches. I reinstalled VM tools and the link to Mac hard drive as a shared drive was reestablished. All of my data was saved and I did not need to bring it back from the archive I had created on an external drive. Software installations went well and took about an hour and half. I still have to configure Golden Eagle for my plane's performance numbers and W&B.The only reason I did not do that last night was that I did not have the data at hand. The update did fix the display issue I was having after the VM3 upgrade.

All in all a pretty painless upgrade considering what it could have been. If you have a Mac running VMFussion and are thinking of doing the upgrade it is not only possible but easy.
 
I have a 27" iMac here that was not being used. I set it up and then put Virtual Box (free) on it and installed Windows server 2008. Whole process took maybe an hour with no hitches.
 
Man, am I glad that Apple has one version of the OS and I don't have to worry about doing anything WRT licensing or reinstalling apps. I have *NEVER* had to install all my apps over again just because of an OS upgrade.
My first Apple Mac OS upgrade was from OS5 to OS6 and now that I am running 10.5 I never once have had to go through anything and annoying as a Windows upgrade. The only reason I had Vista to begin with on my home PC was that it came that way. The last upgrade of an WinOS I made was to go from NT to XP and what a disaster that was. It was less frustrating to just buy a new computer. All in all this upgrade to Win7 was the easiest but it was still a long ways away from how upgrades occur on the Macs. Thankfully VMware stored a lot of preferences and such, like printers. Otherwise I would have had to reinstall all of those too.

Oh and yesterday when I loaded the new OS one of the questions was to download the latest version form the Internet. I checked yes and it appeared to do exactly that. So imagine my surprise a few minutes ago when Windows tells me that it needs to install 61 updates today.
 
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Oh and yesterday when I loaded the new OS one of the questions was to download the latest version form the Internet. I checked yes and it appeared to do exactly that. So imagine my surprise a few minutes ago when Windows tells me that it needs to install 61 updates today.
And two more updates this morning. GEESH how unstable is Windows? All that it ever seems to do is update.
 
And two more updates this morning. GEESH how unstable is Windows? All that it ever seems to do is update.

SHHH....Apple released 54 updates to OS X 10.6 last week...although 53 of them were for Adobe products.
 
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