A guide for installing Windows 7 onto your computer or laptop - Part 1

Below you'll find a quick and easy guide to installing Windows 7 onto your computer or laptop.

1. Prepare and back up your data

OK. Before you attempt to install Windows 7 on your computer, make sure you back up your photos, videos and documents. If you don’t already have one, the fastest and easiest way to do this is to purchase a new external hard drive. Large capacity hard drives are now relatively cheap and should be an essential part of your home network. With that in mind, I recommend you buy an external hard drive that you can attach to your wireless home network.

A clean install is best when installing Windows 7. This will make the new operating system operate much quicker and more efficiently.

Now, you’ll need to find the important personal data that you want to keep. The most important place to look is in your user profile directory. This contains your Documents, Desktop, Pictures, and Application Data folders. For safety, make a copy of C:/Users/ path and back it up on your external hard drive. Have a look through your Program Files and Download files for anything you might have missed.

2. Start the Windows 7 installation

Windows 7 is easy to install. Put the Windows 7 DVD in the drive and reboot the system. You’ll be given an instruction to re-boot from the DVD and you should follow this. If you don’t get this option, go into the BIOS or Setup option on your computer – usually holding down the F2 key before Windows boots up. Now move the DVD drive ahead of the hard drive in the boot order).

Once the Windows 7 installer has launched, select your language, accept the Windows license agreement and choose to perform a ‘Custom install’.

I have never needed to install a partition on my computers and unless you are looking to install dual operating systems on your machine, I recommend you ignore this.

Windows will ask you if you want to format the drive before installation. Remember, formatting a drive removes all it’s data. So be certain that you’ve backed up everything because you can’t get it back, but it’s a good idea to format it as it completely removes the old operating system.

Now you can leave the computer for a while. Windows 7 can take quite a while to install.You’ll probably have time to watch a film. In fact if you’re upgrading instead of performing a clean install, it has taken me up to 18 hours on some computers!

3. Finishing the installation

Once Windows 7 has installed itself, t will ask you to provide a User name and a Computer name. To make networking easy. choose something memorable and catchy. So give your computer a name – ‘Colin’, ‘HAL’, ‘Marvin’ – whatever. Your user name – well – use your name or your company’s name and a number.

You may want to make a password for this account. It’s a good idea if you have children in the house or other people working in your office.

You’ll need to enter the Windows 7 activation product key. This is a 25 digit hexadecimal code. You will find it either on or inside the box that came with your Windows 7 disk. Although Windows 7 will work for 30 days without it – it will stop working after that date.

You are now ready to explore your new operating system.

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