This guy.
Posted on 10/21/2010 6:08:31 PM PDT by dayglored
Microsoft says it has sold 240 million Windows 7 licenses since releasing the operating system to retailers a year ago, making it the fastest-selling OS in the company's history.
Also, as of September, the successor to the much-maligned Windows Vista was running on 93% of new consumer PCs, Microsoft said Thursday. According to Web metrics firm Net Applications, Windows 7 accounted for 17.1% of the global OS market as of the end of September and had surpassed Vista in July.
In the six months after Windows 7 started appearing on store shelves, all of Microsoft's more than 18,000 computer-making partners were selling PCs with the new OS. That compared with 70% during the same period for Vista.
In general, Microsoft software has been getting higher marks from consumers. In 2007, the first full year Vista was available, the company's rating on the American Customer Satisfaction Index was a 70, which is less than the 75 rating for all other software makers. This year's, Microsoft's rating is 76, while other software makers as a group scored 77. (The ACSI scores on a 0-100 scale.)
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(Excerpt) Read more at informationweek.com ...
This guy.
And don't forget the asbestos underwear!
Thanks for the advice, I understand both of your reasoning, and the new hard-drive is a given, but there are a number of reasons why at this time I need to just upgrade the old system, starting with the time involved. I use an incredible number of unique utilities, custom macros and supplemental plugins. In six months I plan on doing a clean install on a new machine at my leisure. I'm doing this now to just get me through a really busy time.
Hate to break it to you, but as a semi-IT guy, the LAST time I’d even think about a system upgrade is when I’m really busy. The odds of something going bad are small, but you know Murphy...
If you don’t have the time to do it correctly right now, then don’t do it at all. Unless you’re willing to spend a day rebuilding things if they go sideways.
And if your HDD is acting up, I’d do it in a hurry - as you point out, the value isn’t in the hardware, it’s in the custom stuff and data on that HDD!
Perhaps your best option would be to use Norton Ghost - image your current disk to an external HDD. Then install the new HDD, and restore the image. At least your hardware would be a bit more stable if you insist on going through with an upgrade at a critical time.
That was my plan.
Sorry weigh in late, but yes Puget's right and your plan is the right one.
My team uses Ghost (or its moral equivalent from Acronis, O&O, and others) all the time for migrations between hardware.
The only thing we've found that's more reliable for copying a hard drive -- because it doesn't try to be intelligent -- is to mount up another identical drive (either internal or USB external), boot up from a Linux LiveCD, and use the Unix/Linux utility "dd" to copy sector-wise from one drive to the other. It's dumb -- it has to copy all the free space along with the data -- but it's 100% reliable and unlike the smarter products, it copies fancy partitioning managers, multi-boot managers, foreign operating systems, and other esoterica perfectly.
But if you're not comfortable with command lines like:
dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/sdcstick with Ghost.
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