If you’ve decided to make the most of your Thanksgiving Day weekend by upgrading your computer to run Windows 7, you may be in for a long (or short) haul, depending upon where you’re starting from Windows 7 can be applied as an upgrade to your OS if you’re running Windows Home Premium or better. In this case, the underpinnings of Windows 7 – along with working drivers for Windows 7 if you’re lucky – are already loaded on your computer and the upgrade process is in order. If you’re running Windows Vista Home Basic or an earlier version of Windows, you’ll either need to do a clean installation, or you’ll need to upgrade to Vista, then upgrade to Windows 7.

Driver Issues May Still Keep You Down

The Windows upgrade route isn’t going to be a smooth sail for many users. The process is rather time consuming, in part, because Windows needs to do a lot of verifying on your existing setup to make sure all of your drivers, components and applications are in order. Not every application that ran smoothly under Vista will run under Windows 7, and part of Windows 7’s setup routine is to verify that each application will (or won’t) run.

If your computer has a lot of applications installed, this part of the setup process can take an extraordinarily long time. Applications that don’t pass the sniff test are marked as such and Windows 7 won’t allow these programs to run in the new OS environment.

Although Microsoft has worked closely with hardware manufacturers to make sure that drivers are available for hardware, there are still a few driver problems to be had, and many manufacturers have announced (post-release) that some of their hardware lines simply won’t be supported under Windows 7.

Before you upgrade your computer, check with the hardware manufacturers that created your monitors, printers, drives, mice, etc., to see whether they’ve created a driver for your particular hardware. In some case, a driver isn’t currently available, but is in the works; in other cases, you may find your hardware on the list of obsolete devices.

That may not be of much comfort to you, but at least you’ll know going into the process whether or not all of your hardware will be making the journey with you. If some pieces of hardware don’t have a Windows 7-compatible driver, you may find luck with a generic driver, or you may find that it’s easier and less hassle to spring for a peripheral upgrade.

Photo Credit: Margaret Shear, via Flickr