Datasheet

5. Accept the license terms and click Next. You’re not going to read all that,
are you?
6. When setup asks “Which type of installation do you want?” (Figure 1-3),
choose Custom (advanced).
7. On the “Where do you want to install Windows?” page (Figure 1-2), click
the drive with the previous version (usually drive C:) and click Next. Don’t
delete or reformat any partitions here, or you’ll lose data with no hope of
recovery.
8. At this point, you’ll get a warning about files from a previous installation;
click OK.
9. Go get yourself a nice cup of tea while Windows copies half a million files
to your hard disk and reboots a few times.
10. When Windows 7 finally loads, it’s time for the DRY step: reorganize the
old folders so the new Windows installation can find all your data. Fire
up Windows Explorer (Chapter 2) and navigate to your c:\Windows.old
\Documents and Settings folder (or, if upgrading Vista, c:\Windows.old
\Users).
11. Next, open the subfolder of your user account, and then open the Desk-
top folder. Press Ctrl-A to select all files and then drag them to your new
Desktop folder at the top of the tree. (Or, create a new folder called Old
Desktop if you don’t want to clutter up your new desktop with all that old
junk.)
If you want to keep the old files in the old locations, hold the
Ctrl
key while dragging and dropping (see Chapter 2 for sub-
tleties) to copy the files instead of moving them.
12. Repeat the previous step for Pictures (or My Pictures in XP), Music (or My
Music), etc., copying each collection of files to the appropriate new
location.
13. Next comes Application Data, which houses the various personalized data
files created by Windows and most of your applications. By default, both
the old folder and its new Windows 7 counterpart are hidden, but if you
show hidden files in Windows Explorer (explained in Chapter 2), you’ll
see them.
In Windows XP, the old files are in C:\Windows.old\Documents and Set-
tings\{your_user_name}\Application Data. For Vista, they’re divided in
both C:\Windows.old\Users\{your_user_name}\AppData\Roaming and
C:\Windows.old\Users\{your_user_name}\AppData\Local.
24 | Chapter 1: Get Started with Windows 7