W7: Upgrade vs Clean Install

This weekend I downloaded W7 RTM and decided to install it in my P1610. I had it before installed in that machine in a second partition and I installed multiple builds always starting from 0. The whole process always took me from 45 to less than 1 hour. With the RTM I decided to upgrade my first partition where I had Vista installed. I had a lot of programs installed there so I thought that the upgrade was going to be quicker than reinstalling everything. I was wrong. The upgrade process took more than 5 hours. After that I discovered that for some reason all the USB Devices were not working because the drivers for them were not installed properly, something that never happened before in my clean installs. Another 5 hours went into the process of finding what was causing the problem. PortShooter, a program created by Fujitsu to protect your laptop from people using the USB ports to copy stuff out of it was causing the issue. The worse thing, this program can’t be uninstalled if you do not go into the program typing a password and select the option for Uninstalling. Even worse, that password for some reason did not work anymore in W7. I had to uninstall manually the program editing the registry and deleting everything relative to the program and all changes made by the program in all the USB drivers configuration keys.

Summarizing, a clean install would have saved me time. Another thing to point. For some reason, I feel that W7 is not as responsive as when I had it in my second partition where I always did a clean install. One of the reason for this is because some of the hacks that I applied to Vista to speed up the system do not work well in W7. I have undone them but still, my upgrade still not at the level I wanted. But I’m too lazy (and I like to be challenged) so I’ll keep digging looking for what to do to make W7 as responsive as it was in a clean install.