Installing Windows 7

I spent a happy few hours yesterday installing Windows 7 on an IBM ThinkCentre. It's a big old brute of a machine, but it's been my workhorse PC for a few years now, used for scanning customer's hard drives, wiping disks - that sort of thing.

It came with Windows XP, and though I think XP is a superb operating system, there comes a moment when one has to move on. Microsoft will stop supporting XP in April 2014 - that means no more updates, which means you will still be able to use XP but it will increasingly become a security risk.

I felt the time had come to make the move to Windows 7.

I used Microsoft's Upgrade Advisor to check that Windows 7 was compatible with the hardware in the ThinkCentre (http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/downloads/upgrade-advisor). A very full report indocated no likely problems.

XP to Windows 7 is a complete reinstall, which means everything on the hard disk is obliterated - yes, everything. To be safe, I decided to install a new hard drive in the ThinkCentre, so that all my data files and programs stay on the original Hard disk.

Everything went smoothly, and Windows 7 was up and running. Immediately there was a noticeable improvment in speed of starting and shutting down. But there was no sound.

The ThinkCentre has a built-in speaker as well as sockets for external speakers. A Google search revealed that there was no Windows 7 driver for the sound. Panic! I should have checked that there  were Windows 7 drivers for the ThinkCentre. Thank goodness I had installed a new hard drive.

I decided to persist with Windows 7 - after all, a silent PC would be no real hardship for me. So I carried on installing the inevitable updates. After a batch had been installed, the PC had to be restarted. When it rebooted, there was the familar Microsoft Windows 7 musical greeting! A look in the Device Manager showed that there was no longer a problem with the sound. And when I connected some speakers to the sound output socket, cheery music bubbled forth!

Somewhere in those updates was the software to make the sound work, most probably a recent addition to the list.

And the morals of this tale?

• Always do all the checks before embarking on a major project such as changing the operating system;
• Do the updates before panicking.