The Reality of Upgrading Between Windows Vista Builds (beta)
One of the benefits of being an active part of the IT Pro community is that you get invited to beta test everything, and if you are smart you will pick and choose the things that most interest you knowing that they may be more advanced but in the earlier stages will crash a lot.
I have now been beta-testing Windows Vista - the next generation desktop operating system - for about eleven months now. If you have been playing with Vista for a few months you may not realize how things were back in the real 'Dogfood Days' and be thankful for it.
One thing I remember vividly is how long the installation process was - depending on how powerful a computer you had it could be from three to seven hours - and it was excrutiating. Imagine getting a new build that you had to install every three weeks or so, and it taking four hours to work - and that was before you installed your applications!
I do not remember exactly when the process was cut down to a reasonable time, but I do remember calling a friend excitedly about it. It was only one of the myriad of bugs that was fixed in the past few releases to get to where we are now - what I consider RTM-quality pre-releases, or what Microsoft calls Release Candidates.
Of course as the months come along I have gotten tired of reinstalling all of my applications and settings just so, and decided this week when RC-2 was released that I would do what until now I have always counselled against... I upgraded from build to build.
For those of you thinking of going this route let me tell you that the result seems to be quite acceptable. However there were two issues that you should know of before making the decision to do as I did.
1. You must have 16 Gigabytes free on your system partition. This was a stumbling block for me because I decided to partition my drive for four OSes and a data partition, so I had to do some real spring cleaning. I changed my Exchange profile so that there was no on-disk caching, and freed up whatever else I could. Unfortunately this still left me with under 8 gigabytes free. This gave me the opportunity to do something in Windows that was previously unavailable, and that is resize my system partition.
When I mentioned this option to someone a while ago he got upset that Microsoft was trying to put Partition Magic out of business and I will tell you this is not true. You cannot move partitions, and if the unallocated space is not directly before or after your system partition then forget about it, but once I did some juggling it worked like magic!
2. Like all Vista installations it is (compared to Vista's older cousins) a completely hands-off install. Once you have punched in your serial number and accepted the EULA, you can walk away and wait to hear the Windows start-up music. However if you are upgrading be ready to wait.
I had somewhere to be last night, but before I went out I wanted to just get the install going, and I would come home and it would be done. I pressed GO and walked out of the house at 7:45. When I came home some 3.5 hours later I figured the system had crashed, because it was only on the 'expanding files' session, and at that only 18% through. But the hard drive light was flashing and I decided I did not need the computer, and if it was frozen I could deal with it in the morning. Before I lay me down to sleep about 90 minutes later there had been progress, and at some point during the night I was awakened (very momentarily) by the Welcome sound effects.
I woke up the next morning hoping for success because it was a beautiful mid-October holiday Monday, and probably my last chance to golf before my clubs went into hibernation. I did not want computers on my mind. Sure enough the system upgraded flawlessly. I have worked on it for a few hours since and from what I can tell everything is in order. I was then able to re-shrink the partition so I could (eventually) install my other OSes, and that went flawlessly too.
My advice to you? Sure, go for the upgrade. However do not do it in a cafe thinking you will be done in an hour. Ultimately you should start it before a prolonged period that you will not need your computer - either before you go to bed or as you leave for work. Plan, prepare, and succeed... and let me know how it goes!