Solved: Upgrading to Windows 7 on an HP a6360t with a second hard drive

• October 9, 2009
• James Skemp
• article

I purchased an HP Pavilion a6360t with Windows Vista Home Premium and later upgraded it (due to a conference) for free to Windows Vista Ultimate, and then added a second hard drive.

What would happen when I upgraded to Windows 7 Home Premium? Could I use the 64-bit version?

The answer to these questions is, due to testing, below:

Windows 7

Upgrading, doing a custom/clean install on my primary drive required approximately 38 minutes. That's it. That's for about 170 GB of data on a 455 GB drive/partition.

A Windows.old directory was created and contains PerfLogs, Program Files, Users, and Windows directories, however since I backed everything up, I believe these can be safely removed.

64-bit

Running an Intel tool to verify, I was rather certain that I would be able to run a 64-bit operating system. And I can.

Second hard drive

The second hard drive was untouched. I did notice some weirdness when I was downloading Microsoft's AV solution, where a temporary directory was created on my secondary drive, but everything on the drive is still there, as I wanted.

• windows 7
• hp pavilion a6360t