Like a lot of Windows Vista users, I couldn’t wait to upgrade to Windows 7 on my home PC. Finally, something from Microsoft that promised to make computing faster and easier. Since I was just moving from Vista Home Premium to 7 Home Premium I didn’t even bother backing up my files.

That was nearly a very big mistake.

The upgrade ended up taking more than a week, with multiple phone calls to India and five hours on the phone with Microsoft engineers. And I now have several more hours of work ahead to reinstall all my applications and sort out my personal files. I don’t think I’ve lost any data, but fast and easy it wasn’t.

The problem, as far as anyone at Microsoft is able to tell me, was that some of the Windows 7 files were corrupted when the initial upgrade took place. Various functions, such as Windows Explorer, failed to work - and I couldn’t repeat the upgrade because the machine wouldn’t read the Windows 7 disk anymore.

I discovered Microsoft has two levels of helpdesk - and that they’re closed late on a Sunday afternoon in California. Two and a half hours on a Wednesday evening with a first-level helper failed to solve the problem, so I was promised a call from a “research engineer”. I wasn’t permitted to call them, they had to agree a time to call me.

Unfortunately my engineer, Ritesh, was struggling with the time zones and kept calling three hours early when I wasn’t home, so we missed our Friday evening and Sunday lunchtime appointments. Repeat calls through desk level one, though, finally elicited a response, and we connected for another two and a half hour session.

The upshot: Ritesh couldn’t fix the machine either, so we ended up performing a custom install - something like a clean install, he said, except all my data would be moved into a separate folder called “windows.old”, so I would be able to recover it.

Things started to look up. The install worked - though that was not the end of it.

There was a nasty moment when it looked like most of my wife’s files had vanished. Under her user name in Windows.old I could only find two years’ worth of pictures, and no music at all. My life flashed before my eyes. So it was a great relief to find her missing media somehow mixed in with my own.

Next on the “to do” list: reload all the applications that were lost when we had to reinstall Windows from scratch, then sort out my wife’s pictures and music (not a small job) and reinstate them in her account.

I’m still optimistic that Windows 7 is going to make me a happier and more fulfilled person. Just not quite yet.

Tags: microsoft, Windows 7

November 20, 2009 11:34pm in Software, Tech | Comment