Every once in 2-3 (or in Vista’s case more than5 years) we are forced to upgrade to a new operating system, courtesy technology advancements, coupled with commercial and shareholder’s profit interests .

So, to deal with this really silly phase, I have devised a strategy which helps me to upgrade my system to a new OS smoothly. I have always been cautious in doing an upgrade (no, not money wise my friend!).

Ok, here’s a check list which I follow to the T.

1. Remember always to make more than one partition on your hard drive. With a lot of high capacity drives available on the market these days that shouldn’t be a problem.
2. Keep your Windows XP on your C drive just like normal.
3. Make a list of all the programs that you commonly use (I have already made a list for myself).
4. Normally all your programs running on XP are installed in the Program Files directory.
5. Make a backup of your documents/files/all important data before even attempting anything. Ideally you should be having an external hard drive for this purpose or you can use optical media (CDs/DVDs) which is also a good option.
6. Make sure there’s plenty of space on your second partition (I’m assuming it’s D but it can be anyone after D in case you have more than 2 partitions). Windows Vista Setup will not run until you have roughly 13GB of Hard disk space free.
7. While installing Windows Vista, choose the Advanced Option as we will be using custom settings for our installation. DO NOT use Typical Option. I repeat, DO NOT use Typical Option. Typical is for users who haven’t followed steps 1-6 and who don’t need to be cautious.
8. After installation is complete, take out that installed programs list that you made for yourself in step 3 and start installing them on Windows Vista.

That’s it. It wasn’t that bad was it? Actually, this approach may have already been applied by many of my friends out there but I just wanted to let the others have access to it so that they don’t end up messing their systems while upgrading to Windows Vista.

You people might not be aware but Windows Vista doesn’t come with a  downgrade option like the previous versions of Windows right up to Windows XP Professional had offered. This did come handy when while working with the new OS made you freak out or when it crashed your favorite program or wouldn’t let it work. In many cases, people (that includes me) would just go to Add/Remove Programs and simply uninstall the new operating system (or downgrade back to their old OS).

So to be away from such scary places, take my advice and save yourself the trouble of formatting and re-installing everything from scratch on your PC. Trust me, you wouldn’t want to go through that much trouble!

Well, that’s it for me. Your comments and feedback are highly appreciated by me, so keep sending them in.

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