Well, a new laptop for Fran which came with Windows 7 Home Premium (64Bit) … great.

A few hours spent making sure it is up to date, that I have recovery disks created and that I delete all of the games programs, Norton and MacFee (replacing them with AVG) ….

Because of some legacy stuff though I needed the excellent Windows Virtual PC/XP which meant an upgrade to Win7Pro ….no problem, even the £189 seemed ok (more than half the actual laptop cost!) and then I set about downloading it … I spent 4 hours downloading it, got to bed very very late having just finished (a) the download and (b) the creation of a dvd in case I lost the download.

So this morning I go to upgrade the laptop … “You can’t” it says, to upgrade from one version of Windows 7 to another you need to use the Windows Anytime Upgrade facility instead! So those 4 hours were completely wasted …. great

So I go to tell Microsoft support but as that will cost me £169 or so in support charges I decide not to …

Now I do the upgrade, it takes around 20 minutes and reports that it fails! It also says “Go online to try and resolve this issue” but all it says there is “Go to the support centre” … great, joy of joys, sheesh …. does “Anytime” upgrade mean that it will take any amount of time?

A little later I just tried thee update again .. worked perfectly, but I hadn’t changed anything … oh well, at least its done … now to download the 47,000 files in my LiveDrive and then use PCmover to copy over the old account and then all I have to do is fight with Access 2007 to get it to run in WindowsXP mode … yes, I know, its an old version, but it has been working since Access 95 and uses jet replication and I am working on a newer better web-based version for “soon” 😉