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Now let's talk about a tool called the Windows 7 Upgrade Advisor. Before you upgrade a machine to Windows 7 you need to download this tool and run it to make sure that your computer is going to give you the kind of functionality that you expect or that you need. Now you will run into some situations with certain applications that they will into function in Windows 7 and another thing that you really want to watch for are things like audio cards support and the video support. The audio and the video are the two things that I have seen most problematic in Windows 7 upgrades so far, OK? But let's go talk about this Windows 7 upgrade advisor. First of all go out to Microsoft.com and then search within Microsoft.com for Windows 7 Upgrade Advisor and you can also search for this in Google but just make sure that you're on the Microsoft website to download it, you're not on some third party or some phishing or something, OK? So just be safe. So go to Microsoft.com, you'll click and you will download this Upgrade Advisor and notice you're going to download this Setup.EXE file and once you get that downloaded you're going to install it. Once that installation is complete if you come out here to Start and go to All Programs and then if you come down a little bit there it is right there, Windows 7 Upgrade Advisor. It will show up in your Programs and you can just kick this thing off. It'll ask you; do you want to allow it to make changes? It's not actually going to but it thinks it is because of the way its running and we're just going to click Start Check. Now this thing is going to generally take probably two to four minutes on most machines that I've seen. But you want to run this on your machine or on a representative machine if you're in a cooperate environment to see generally what kind of compatibility issues you're going to have. Now, I have found this thing to be quite accurate as to predicting what will and will not work on Windows 7. OK, so you can trust what you see here. Now notice they have a number of hyperlinks on here, you can go online to learn more about Windows 7 and you can go online to get compatibility information. Now I will tell you through the beta versions of Windows 7 there were tons and tons of driver issues and if you go out in the forums and so forth you'll see these things but they're being cleared up pretty quickly. For example, all the machines that I have although there are four or five machines here that I have that I have been playing with Windows 7 on and on all of those except one I have all the drivers that I need now and those just kind of keep showing up. So this is going to run for a few seconds, it's going to gather compatibility and it'll give us a report. Now I'm going to pause the video and the come back as soon as this completes. Now notice it has found 6 items that I need to address and that only took maybe three minutes to run. First of all it's letting me know that I'm running the most complete version of Windows 7, OK? I have 7 Ultimate installed, I'm running a Hewett Packard machine OK, and its telling me I can visit Hewett Packard website about more information about updated Windows 7 Drivers and that sort thing. Now 4 system requirements passed, now this is important, if I click on this Link it will take me out there and show me that my Windows Aero Support checked, so my graphics adapter will support all the fancy Windows Aero Glass Effects. My CPU speed passed, I exceeded the minimum. I have enough RAM, I exceeded the 2 gig minimum and I have enough free space, OK? So I can go back to my Overview, My Devices, I can click on this and I can see all the Devices on my machine that passed. I won't have any problem, notice my Audio Device down here and so I'll go back to the Overview there and then notice Programs, it's showing me here, for example I had Virtual PC 2007 installed on this machine when I was running Vista before I upgraded to Windows 7 and you can tell now that this version will not work on Windows 7 and that is absolutely true, it has all kinds of problems on Windows 7. There is a new version of this that came out with Windows 7 by the way. So show me some other things that I have, HP Media Smart DVD, it says they don't have information about this but I can get an update to a compatible version, I can chase some things down. I can see all the Programs in my machine that are listed as compatible and you'll notice here for example Visual Studio 2008, Power To Go, Live Essentials, Adobe Reader 9, so forth, Office Power Point Viewer. So there's a lot of things that this is telling me, once I've seen all this stuff I can Save a Report or I can print a Report from the Upgrade Advisor here. So run this thing on your machine, I have found it to be quite accurate, you can trust what its telling you and it will give you an idea, kind of where you're headed with Windows 7 before you install it only to find out you can't get your sound card working or you don't get all the graphics features and you wish you had stayed on Vista a little while longer or bought a new card or whatever. OK, so, that's the Upgrade Advisor, just wanted you to be aware of it.
| Course: | Microsoft Windows 7 |
| Author: | Mark Long |
| SKU: | 34064 |
| ISBN: | 1-935320-86-6 |
| Release Date: | 2009-12-10 |
| Duration: | 7 hrs / 74 lessons |
| Work Files: |
Yes |
| Captions: | No |
| Compatibility: |
Vista/XP/2000, OS X, Linux QuickTime 7, Flash 8 |