[...] Windows 7 Beta – Is it Worth the Pain? Posted on Sunday, January 11th, 2009 in Featured – Views: (668) There is a lot of hoopla going on in the blogosphere about Windows 7. Discussion at my friend’s (Stratos) blog made me think about this. Is downloading & installing Windows7 worth all the pain?Microsoft made an announcement that they will be giving out 2.5 million copies of Windows 7 beta for free on January 9th 2009. As predicted by many, Microsoft servers failed to scale up to the demand and went down. [...]

The most intelligent comment I can find is “The difference appears to be the loader. Windows 7 (and Server 2008 R2) uses a virtual-friendlier loader, while Vista uses an earlier version loader.”

I’m not quite sure what to make of that. I may try updating my BIOS flash, as I have a fairly old mobo/bios (as in Vista ready), but in the mean time I’ve just reinstalled Vista x64.

I was just posting my experience as a balance as there was not much comment (anywhere) other than it is flawless at the time.

I found a posting elsewhere from someone who had a similar experience and after a failed upgrade it did install fresh for him ok.

So I’m just waiting until I’ve got time to install the beta plus reinstall Vista in the event that it doesn’t work.

The first attempt resulted in some sort of stuck drive access sequence, so I rolled-back.

The second attempt almost worked but got stuck near the end failing to update the registry.

I’ve again rolled-back but by default it’s now booting to a 7 screen that says the upgrade failed (I can manually select Vista tho at the boot manager).

My next attempt will be to do a ‘fresh’ install. That might work as it won’t have to deal with importing (or whatever) my existing registry but if not I’ll just reinstall Vista, which is relatively painless.