Setup also told me that the Catalyst Control Center and the Catalyst Uninstall Manger – both AMD helper apps for the Radeon HD 4870 drivers – weren’t compatible, and I should uninstall them. I sighed, quit Setup.
One other type of application that may have been incompatible (depending on the revision and developer) would have been antivirus software, but that wasn’t installed on this system. It’s behind a hardware firewall and is really only used once a week for LAN gaming.
This is where I discovered you can’t really uninstall Catalyst Uninstall Manager, unless you uninstall all ATI software, including the drivers. Although I’d plan on upgrading the drivers anyway, I thought this was a mildly amusing oversight on AMD’s part.
So I removed the entire Catalyst software suite, rebooted, and started up Windows 7 setup. At this point, the upgrade process went smoothly. Of course, the E8500 isn’t quite the speed demon that the Core i7 965 is. That performance difference, plus the extra complexity of an upgrade setup (versus a clean install) meant the whole affair took about 2-1/2 hours.
The last stuff to wrap up was activating Windows 7, installing a couple of minor updates, and installing the latest Catalyst 9.8 drivers for 32-bit Win 7. I was quite gratified to discover that installing the graphics driver didn’t require a reboot. It’s about time.
Prior to the upgrade, I’d run a quick 3DMark Vantage pass with the existing Vista drivers (Catalyst 9.6), and got a score of around 7,600. After the upgrade, and of course, newer drivers, the 3DMark Vantage score came it at just over 8,000.
Overall, the entire upgrade process went very smoothly, but this wasn’t a particularly complex system. The next upgrade will be taking a laptop with a pretty creaky Vista install and trying to run the Windows 7 upgrade. That should be more… interesting.
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2 comments
Jayson Rowe says:
August 21, 2009 at 4:08 am (UTC -7 )
Thanks Loyd, That machine is somewhat similar to my “production box” at work (Dell Precision Workstation, C2D E6850 3GHz, 4GB RAM) which is running Vista Bus. 64 ATM – planning to take it to Win 7 Bus 64 and was really hoping not to have to totally repave it right now. So far, I’ve heard nothing but good reviews around doing an upgrade install, so over time I’m feeling more assured that everything should go ok.
Brandon Champion says:
August 21, 2009 at 9:07 am (UTC -7 )
Thanks, Loyd. I’m glad you are writing about this. It’s going to save me a lot of trouble in a few months. If you upgrade a system with NVidia drivers, please post about that experience too… good, bad or ugly.