My Road to Windows 7

Last night, I was suddenly all revved up to install Windows 7 Release Candidate. I had downloaded the 64-bit version for quite some weeks now but never got to installing it but last night - YEAH! And so I was about to burn the ISO image to DVD when I had a sudden thought to Google and see if there was any way to install without wasting a DVD since this is a Release Candidate and will ceased to be useful from March 2010 and totally unusable June 2010. I wasn't too optimistic but Google served me well! One can do it with the ISO image and a thumbdrive (but you would need at least a 4GB one due to the huge Windows 7 installation files).

I clicked on a couple of links but was only successful after the third. BlogsDNA has a step-by-step guide. First, there was the need to download MBRwiz to do some stuff to the computer so that you can make the thumbdrive bootable in a later step. It is a command prompt program which required administrator privileges and my Windows Vista did not have any visible method to run a command prompt with those privileges. Panic! Panic! Panic! Looks like I might have to burn the DVD after all! But Google saved the day again.

The How-To Geek has a simple solution. Type "cmd" at the search bar just below "All Programs". Then, instead of hitting just the "enter" key, press "ctrl" + "shift" + "enter". The blardy UAC thing will appear but once you get rid of that, you will have command prompt with admin privilege. With that settled, next was to mount the ISO image and BlogsDNA got just the link to the program just for that.

Another step that didn't quite work out was to make the thumbdrive bootable. This MIGHT be due to the ISO image was a Windows 7 64-bit version while I am running a 32-bit Vista. Luckily, some where in the comments section of BlogsDNa, someone found a place where I could download an alternative. Phew! And from there, just continue the steps in BlogsDNA and reboot with the thumbdrive.

But it was a bummer to find that one of my buds couldn't download Windows 7 RC and asked me to burn him a copy. @#$$#%#!!!