Windows 7

Ufff... I have just (almost) finished migrating my system (the Lenovo x200s) from Windows Vista (32-bit) to Windows 7 (64-bit). And I feel the result is worth the effort. It took me a lot of time - I started two days ago.

The upgrade process itself was triggered by my hard drive running out of space after taking more than two thousand pictures during the summer holidays. As some of you may remember, I have been using the 200GB Hitachi FDE (Full Disk Encryption) drive for the last 18 months... It has been performing flawlessly... But now it is simply not spacious enough... And I am not going to give away the convenience of having all my personal data and files with me at all times. This is also the reason why I have opted for the FDE drive. The FDE concept is simple - the drive has a security chip in it and always encrypts data. You control the encryption by setting a drive password in BIOS. With no password, the drive happily releases the key used to decrypt data when passing it to the computer. With password set, at each power cycle you have to type the password in to release the encryption key. When your computer is lost or stolen, chances that somebody will be able to read your data are virtually none. I like this concept, as it lets me sleep well, while introducing almost no hassle in everyday use. And most importantly - it does not require to install any kind of software. Just set up the password in BIOS.

As I have been very happy with the FDE concept, it is quite natural I wanted my next drive to be FDE too... And it would be nice it it was a SSD (Solid State Drive) as well... Due to the requirements, my options were quite limited and I settled for the Lenovo 43N3417 ThinkPad 256GB FDE Solid State Drive. Initially I thought it was going to be re-branded Samsung drive, but when arrived I saw it actually was a Toshiba. Interestingly, it is a 1.8 inch drive in a 2.5 inch bracket... Toshiba must have a 512GB one up its slave in 2.5 inch factor...

So back to the Windows 7 subject. I had very little space left on my old drive, not enough to just upgrade Vista to W7. I could temporarily remove some stuff to make the upgrade possible, but it is always good to have a fresh Windows installation from time to time... even if it costs more time... In my case the migration was especially tough, as I needed to complete three steps:

1. Install the new OS (Windows 7) on the new drive.
2. Install all the applications on the new drive.
3. Migrate data and metadata.

I decided to go for the 64-bit version of Windows 7 Ultimate and carefully planned the first milestone. 64-bit Windows does not let you install unsigned drivers for third party hardware, so before I went to proceed with steps 2 and 3, I'd had to be sure my crucial hardware devices were working properly. I narrowed the list of must have devices to the following:

• Clone CD Virtual Clone Drive (I keep images of CDs on my NAS server and use them very often, especially as the X200s does not have a CD drive). This application works without a glitch with Windows 7 x64.
• Primo PDF virtual PDF printer. A fantastic piece of software for converting just about anything to PDF format. No problem with W7 x64 either.
• Canon IP5200R wireless networked home printer. Here things went a little more difficult, but downloading a 64-bit Vista driver and later running a LAN utility did the job.
• Fujitsu ScanSnap S300. This is a long story. To make it short I am going to redirect you to the http://www.cartoonmonkey.com/the-last-fujitsu-product-i-will-ever-own/ page. The bottom line is - it works fine, but why the software is not officially available from Fujitsu, I have no idea...
• Option GlobeTrotter 225 USB HSDPA modem. I have settled with the GlobeTrotter Connect application, dropping the one that comes from my MNO... The GTC setup seems to be much cleaner... It appears to work, but I will have to test it over the next couple of business trips...
  

With the hardware compatibility milestone test passed, I could continue my migration process. Things started to look good at that time, by the way... I was impressed how the Windows 7 setup process went through... Not sure it was 30 or 40 minutes all together (and not sure how much of that should I attribute to the fantastic speed of the SSD drive), but Windows 7 installed a native driver to all hardware components of my Lenovo laptop. What a relief... A clean, really clean Windows install, no trace of any fancy ThinkVantage software installers and managers... Even the fingerprint reader has a native applet in the new Control Panel.... There was just one exception... an unidentified PCI communications device that later appeared as Intel Management Interface, something really minor... But all other hardware system components were up and running... The system software I have now is at least as clean as the Mac OS - no third party stuff and everything works. I guess the lack of system vendor's applets and drivers is at least partially responsible for relieving more than 30 Gigabytes of storage and my system using just about 1GB of RAM, even with FireFox with 25 tabs opened in the background. What a difference it makes, compared to my first Vista experience...

With all that sugar above I have to put some grain of salt here. My computer was almost fully installed in two hours. Next forty-or-so hours I spent moving my data from the old drive to the new one. Actually moving data is easy, comes down to copying the Documents, Music, Pictures and Videos files to the NAS server (and with a gigabit network in place it is really fast...) and then from the NAS to the new drive. The real pain is to migrate the metadata. Things like FireFox sessions, passwords and cookies, IE certificates, VPN networks settings, SSH sessions, Picasa albums, iTunes playlists... The list is long and it is not possible to just have the old drive attached, as many of those settings are hidden either in the registry or in places not easy to identify. So should something appear missing, often the only way is to power down the machine, take out the new drive, put in the old one, fire up the old OS and do some search or exports. There are all sorts of wizards and third party software to help with that, but most of them work when you move the stuff to a new machine, so both can be placed side by side and connected with a piece of wire... If you just swap a hard drive, everybody expects you to just upgrade the old system with the new one... and if you want a fresh install, you are on your own... Or may be not? But honestly I do not know a trustworthy software that would intelligently dump all the settings to a file and then re-read them. if you have something to recommend here, I am all ears. In the meantime, moving the meta-data is still a meta-challenge.

But again, just from a perspective of 40 hours, efforts undertaken to move to Windows 7 are clearly rewarded. Vista should be forgotten...