#pc maintaince

So you have a computer or a laptop that you need get Windows 7 on yourself?

Assuming you have a component list of what's running in your computer/laptop, and a (preferably) valid Windows 7 installation disk and an active internet connection, you should be good to go.

First thing's first you need to boot up and get the Windows 7 installation disk in the computer to boot off of. As soon as the power is on to the computer, you have to open that disk tray and get the disk in there. Then I recommend you power off, wait 3 seconds and power back on. Once the power is restored, you then hit F2 or F12 or ESC, this varies between motherboards and manufacturers.

Depending on which button you hit, you may or may not have been brought to the BIOS screen, where I highly recommend you change nothing but what I'm about to list. If you end up in your BIOS, I recommend you simply arrow over to section that should be called something like, "Boot Options" or, "Boot Order." From there you want to find where it has a list of boot devices and change it so that the computer attempts booting from your disc drive before your hard drive.

If you hit the button and it brings you straight to a boot device changing menu, you're in luck! You didn't have to navigate through your BIOS and you select your disk drive from there.

So assuming you've gotten this far, you should then see a statement come up such as, "Press any key to boot from CD or DVD.." When that comes up, literally hit any key on your keyboard and observe as it starts to read from your Windows disk and the screen should change to show you Windows is loading.

After a little while, a screen will come up with a button that says, "Install now." You go ahead and click that, and then it will bring you to a screen that has two choices, "Upgrade," or "Custom." (At least I think it's custom, I'm doing this straight from memory.)

It's at this point where decisions have to be made. If you actually were doing this as part of an upgrade, than click "Upgrade," but be warned that although your files will be saved and found on the new installation, I believe it will be a little bit slower of an install (at the very least) because it has to be careful with your files.

As an enthusiast, I recommend that you have everything you wanted backed up on an external hard drive or some external storage device. For two reasons, the first being that you should probably have that done anyway and the second being that I like having a 100% clean, fresh installation. Something about knowing I'm starting 100% fresh is a good thing.

So, assuming you take my advice and go with starting fresh and chose custom, you will be brought to a screen you select each partition, if there was a previous install of Windows on the hard drive, and select drive options, and then choose to delete them. Repeat this until you have just one selection that says something along the lines of unallocated space, and reports a size something close to the complete size of your hard drive.

From here, you want to select that space and install Windows to it. Then basically plug in all the information it asks when it asks and just watch the install as it goes through all of it's stages. One thing to note is to be sure to not touch it as it reboots your computer automatically while installing. Because you have you Windows CD in, when it reboots it will ask if you want to install from the disk again, and you have to just not touch anything. Just let the installation work through all of it's steps on it's own. Also, I would highly recommend not shaking the laptop or computer and keep everything very still in general. There have been times where something was moved and the disk skipped ever so slightly and I had corrupt files when I first booted into Windows.

Okay, so assuming you got to where Windows is booted and you actually load into Windows. You should make it a point to go back into BIOS or your boot selection screen and have it boot from the hard drive again, it will save you time on start up.

That's all I'm going to run you through on this post, my next post is going to be the tweaks you perform right after a fresh install to get peak performance out of your machine. Also, there are probably more, but the ones I list I know are safe.

Enjoy!

** Also, please consult me before posting this anywhere else.