Windows 7 setup secrets

As of May 5, the general public is finally allowed to download the official Windows 7 Release Candidate. It’s been up on BitTorrent networks since mid-April, and developers with MSDN or TechNet subscriptions have had access to it since April. But those groups constitute a tiny fraction of the people who are seeing the Windows 7 release candidate for the first time with its public release. (You can find downloads and installation instructions at Microsoft’s website.)

For the benefit of the early adopters and those who patiently wait, I’ve been gathering information on the right and wrong ways to set up Windows 7. For the past week or so I’ve been installing and upgrading the RC code on a wide variety of systems—notebooks and desktops, with and without touch and tablet capabilities, with and without TV tuners and Blu-ray drives, as clean installs and upgrades, in x86 and x64 flavors, documenting the process.

In this post, I want to share seven of the lessons I’ve learned along the way, including a few setup secrets that even some Windows experts don’t know about.

Secret #1: Choose the right Setup option

Secret #2: Start with a clean disk

Secret #3: Back up your old drivers first

Secret #4: Do a nondestructive clean install

Secret #5: You need less disk space than you think

Secret #6: Unblock the upgrade path for Windows 7 beta

Secret #7: Unlock those extra editions

By Ed Bott is an award-winning technology writer with more than two decades’ experience writing for mainstream media outlets and online publications