Updating to...@%*$!!... Freshly installing Windows 7

So, the occasionally rabid programmer is back after a long and interesting international hiatus with sufficient emotional involvement to produce an entire seasons' worth of drama.

Today's episode is about trying to upgrade the parents' vista boxes to windows 7. The experience wasn't pleasant.

You might remember that those machines were organized into operating system, user data and backup partitions. It turns out that windows 7 does not only require a whopping 16GB free space for inplace upgrades, no, it also doesn't allow inplace upgrades if the Windows, Program Files and Users folders reside on the same partition. Ouch?

For the record, here's the way to reduce the space taken up by the WinSxS directory:

1. Open an administrative command prompt
2. Run compcln (presumably you already are in the system32 directory)
3. Answer the question with Yes

The procedure to copy profiles to a separate drive following a fresh install also had to be changed because of a bug in the way windows 7 handles profiles:

1. Download the windows enabler tool from here, unzip and run it as administrator
2. Create a user account via Administrative Tools / Computer Management / Local Users and Groups / Users
3. Log into the user account you just created and log out again
4. Control Panel / System and Maintenance / System / Advanced / System Settings / Advanced / User Profiles / Settings... / Copy To...
5. Notice how the Copy To... button is disabled? Click on the enabler icon in the quicklaunch and then click the button again to enable and once more to actually use it...
6. and copy the user account to its new home
7. regedit and go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\ProfileList
8. You can modify the root of all users right here, or move dedicated accounts to the other drive, which is what I did
9. Find the guid for the profile you just moved and change its ProfileImagePath
10. Restart the machine
11. Remove the old folder under C:\users
12. Done!
    

Following these steps, I discovered that my parents' machines suffered from graphics card instabilities and no sound with the most up-to-date window update drivers. The solution for the 6150 graphics card was to download the newest drivers from NVIDIAs website, and the drivers from the realtek site (which proved tough to download in IE but were easy to access from chrome) to enable sound again.

Unfortunately, the black screen on logout and the ensuing hard shut-downs had caused measurable data loss and quirkyness, so a complete reinstall was required. I manually disabled the write cache on the hard drive, just because I wouldn't want to go through remote maintenance for this type of issue in the future. That said, I was surprised by the event - I had previously assumed that the journaled file system would prevent this precise problem.

Furthermore, the built-in flash card reader is detected by Windows and installs, but does not detect disks under windows 7 (it's an ASUS Flash HS-COMBO 3.95). Very frustrating, given that I can't find any drivers for this component online.

The last nonfunctioning device was the Epson EPL 5900L laser printer; manually installing the XP driver from the Epson website fixed this problem, fortunately, but be warned: there is no X64 version.

Windows installs from scratch nicely and swiftly, but the inability to upgrade due to user profiles on another partition and the idiotically disabled Copy To... button are unnecessary holdups. The freezing black screen on logout caused by the default microsoft 6150 driver is a disgrace, as is the lack of sound output on anything but the s/pdif out devices for most of the machines I've updated to 7 so far. I am disappointed at the class drivers installed by default with windows 7 that then fail to work spectacularly.