The Download Blog

If you're upgrading from Windows Vista to Windows 7 it should be a fairly easy install. You can do what's called an in-place upgrade as long you install the same version of Windows 7 as you have of Vista.

For instance, if you have Windows Vista Home premium you can upgrade to Windows 7 Home Premium. You can also go from Vista Business to Windows 7 Professional, and from Vista Ultimate to 7 Ultimate. Any other upgrade, like Vista Home Premium to Windows 7 Professional, will require a clean install. That means you can't just turn Vista into 7. You have to export all your data, erase the hard drive, and then reinstall all your applications and data. A lot of computer experts think you should do a clean install anyway, just to make sure your machine runs better.

See our video for upgrading XP to Windows 7 for that process.

But if you're lucky enough to be able to do an in-place upgrade and want to, here's what you do.

Most of the audio engineers I've met--both home and professional--are Mac people, and Avid's ProTools running on a Mac is often cited as the industry standard. But there are Windows loyalists out there.

In late 2007 I took an introductory audio production class taught by David Huber (who wrote one of the bibles on the subject, "Modern Recording Techniques") and Scott Colburn (who has produced albums by The Arcade Fire, Animal Collective, and Sun City Girls, among many others). Both of them used Nuendo from Steinberg (which is basically the upmarket version of Cubase) as their primary digital audio workstation (DAW), and they ran it on a Windows PC.

Windows 7 should offer better performance for digital audio than Vista.

A Windows XP PC, that is. Both were very diplomatic when discussing software and other gear, but they expressed pretty serious reservations about Vista. Microsoft made a ton of changes in Vista that were supposed to improve performance, including moving certain audio capabilities out of the kernel, but these experts--whose livelihood depends on having a high-performing DAW--thought it was too untested and unknown.

Although they didn't say so, I imagine that the driver incompatibilities reported with other hardware could have been an absolute nightmare with all the gear in a professional recording rig. There were also reports of unstable MIDI timing, drop-outs, latency, and other problems (many of which were addressed by Service Pack 1). They weren't alone: the general advice for audio engineers on Windows was stick with XP. (If anybody had a success story using Vista to build a DAW, I'd love to hear about it in comments.)

In case you haven't heard, Microsoft releases a new version of Windows next week. I've been using the RTM version for a few weeks now and find it far more stable and inviting than Vista was at launch. (Although a colleague did uncover a gnarly power-management problem in Media Center related to a faulty audio driver.) Now, some of the audio experts are starting to weigh in, and it looks like the work Microsoft did to improve performance and compatibility with Windows 7 are paying off in the world of audio production.

Noel Borthwick, the chief technical officer for Cakewalk--which makes a wide variety of audio software for Windows, including the Sonar DAW line--has posted a blog entry describing how the new OS should dramatically reduce latency, particularly on x64 multicore processors. (Borthwick also went into more obsessive detail on Peter Kirn's Create Digital Music blog.) His conclusion: "I will be building a new DAW soon and Windows 7 X64 will be my OS of choice."

The long and short of it? If you're building a new recording system, Windows 7 sounds like a more reasonable choice than Vista. But if you've got a system that's already working well, don't mess with it--there still might be driver incompatibilities with older gear, and upgrades from Windows XP require a clean install, meaning your old settings will be lost and you'll have to reinstall your apps.

Correction, 2:34 PDT: This post incorrectly characterized the audio-related changes that Microsoft made in Windows Vista. Microsoft moved certain audio functions out of the kernel and into the user stack.

Although Windows 7 has been praised for loading and shutting down faster than prior versions of Windows, one software company says that, in many cases, the new operating system can take longer to get started than Windows Vista.

Iolo Technlogies, which sells PC tune-up software, said its lab unit found that a brand-new machine running Windows 7 takes a minute and 34 seconds to become usable, as compared to a minute and 6 seconds for Windows Vista. Iolo notes that it measured not the time it takes for the desktop to appear--which can be as little as 40 seconds on a fresh installation of Windows 7--but rather the time it takes to become fully usable "with CPU cycles no longer significantly high and a true idle state achieved."

The results are also fairly similar to what CNET found in its testing of the operating system. A Microsoft representative was not immediately able to comment on Iolo's findings.

Iolo plans to release more details on its findings and methodology next week. Although it remains to be seen just how it reached its conclusion, the report is clearly not good news for an operating system whose primary selling point is doing the basics better than past versions of Windows.

I will say that for my part, I have been using Windows 7 for months now and find myself rarely doing a full reboot and instead going in and out of sleep for days at a time--a process that moves particularly quickly.

As is often the case with Windows, Iolo found that things only get worse over time. It found that a three-month-old machine can take up to a minute longer to boot, or 2 minutes and 34 seconds. Windows 7 did outperform Vista at the three-month and six-month marks, Iolo said, but it generally "trailed the older version significantly" in its boot-up tests.

I plan to follow up on this on Monday, when more details about Iolo's conclusions--and how they were reached--become available.

Updated at 7:20 p.m. PDT: On the plus side, Wall Street Journal reviewer Walt Mossberg is out with his review of Windows 7 and gives it high marks, saying Microsoft now gives Apple a run for its money.

My previous post described how to add information to and otherwise customize Windows' Welcome screen. But maybe you just want to get your PC going without having to log into an account. You can bypass Windows' log-on screen by changing settings in the Windows Registry, as described in a tutorial on the Computer Performance site, but I find it much simpler to use a free Windows-tweaking utility to do the same thing.

The program I used to customize the Windows Welcome screen—TweakNow PowerPack 2009—is the same tool I used to disable the log-on screen on my Vista laptop. Click Windows Secret in the utility's left pane and choose User Accounts. Click "Enable auto log-on," select the account you want to log into automatically, enter the account's password and domain name (if necessary), and click Save. The next time you start the PC, Windows will start and open that account automatically.

Set Windows to start logged into a specific account—without having to enter a password—via this setting in TweakNow PowerPack 2009.

(Credit: TweakNow)

TweakNow PowerPack 2009 works with XP, Vista, and Windows 7, but I tested it only with Vista. I didn't need to download the program to my XP test machine because that system already has Tweak UI, Microsoft's free XP-reconfiguration utility that lacks a Vista version.

To set XP to start a specific account without requiring a log-on, open Tweak UI and click Logon > Autologon in the left pane, check "Log on automatically at system startup" in the right window, enter the account's user name and domain (if necessary), and click the Set Password button.

The free Tweak UI utility makes it easy to start Windows without having to log into an account.

(Credit: Microsoft)

In the Set Autologon Password dialog box, enter the account's password in each of the two text boxes and click OK.

Add the account's password twice and click OK to start Windows without having to log in.

(Credit: Microsoft)

Why bypassing the Windows log-on is dangerous
Setting Windows to open an administrator account automatically is risky, period. Even starting a standard account without requiring a password is dangerous, though less so. There are many very good reasons why Windows accounts are password-protected, and far fewer good reasons for doing without passwords.

That's why I recommend against allowing automatic log-ons in general. But far be it from me to tell you how to use your PC, so if you want to save a few seconds each time you start your system—and you're not worried about somebody doing serious mischief after gaining easy access to your account—it's okay by me.

Creating a custom Windows log-on screen has never been faster or simpler. Two free utilities let you do more than replace the boring Windows default start background with a picture of your pet hamsters, though you can do that, too.

Add system info to Windows' start-up sequence
In a post earlier this month, I described the beta version of the free TweakNow PowerPack 2009 utility that makes it easy to view system information, maintain Windows, and customize the OS' interface. As that post stated, I encountered a couple of rough edges in the beta version I looked at, but that's to be expected in a beta.

One TweakNow feature I took advantage of right away was the program's ability to add a "legal disclaimer" screen to Windows start-up. One practical application of this feature is to add information about the system to the screen's text box, which can make life a lot easier for you or for whoever has to maintain the machine.

Suppose you need to find out what type of memory your PC uses, what type of processor it runs, its current version of Windows, or even the toll-free support number of its vendor. It's not always easy to find all this information, which resides in various locations on your system. Utilities such as TweakNow can help you collect this type of data, but you'll still find yourself clicking around their various nooks and crannies to unearth what you need.

You could create an image containing this information and make it your Windows Desktop, but adding system information to a screen that appears early in the Windows start-up sequence not only saves you time rummaging around Windows settings, it also lets you get the info off a machine without having to fully load Windows. This is a capability a lot of IT staffers will likely appreciate, but anyone who maintains multiple PCs could find it a time-saver.

The system information I needed was available in various other TweakNow screens, but it was much easier for me to copy the main System Information screen, paste the data into the text box in the TweakNow Legal Notice dialog (click Windows Secret > User Accounts > Miscellaneous), and edit it there. I added the toll-free support number of the PC's vendor, just in case.

Add system information to the Windows log-on screen via the free TweakNow PowerPack 2009 utility.

(Credit: TweakNow)

Place text in a custom welcome-screen image
If you're one of the many people who simply want Windows to load quickly, you won't be happy having to click through yet another screen before you can start your workday. Stardocks offers two free programs that let you create your own welcome screen, complete with any text you want ready access to.

LogonStudio Vista and LogonStudio XP can replace the default welcome/log-on screen with a more visually exciting image from a free online library, or you can create your own welcome image.

Stardock's LogonStudio Vista makes replacing the default Windows welcome screen as easy as 1-2-3.

(Credit: Stardock)

To test the program, I opened an image in Paint, added a text box containing information about the system, and then loaded the image using LogonStudio's Create and Upload options.

Place a text box holding system information into your custom welcome screen via Stardocks' free LogonStudio utility.

(Credit: Dennis O'Reilly)

Frankly, I was more pleased with the presentation of the information in TweakNow's "Legal Disclaimer" screen than in LogonStudio's custom welcome screen. But if you want to avoid an extra start-up click and don't mind taking the time to create a custom welcome screen, it doesn't get much easier than using LogonStudio.

Every time Microsoft delivers a new OS it's possible to get many of the features of a Windows upgrade in the previous version of Windows. Windows 7 is no exception. Here's a roundup of a few things you can do to make Windows Vista as Windows 7-like as possible, without shelling out for the new OS.

We'll start out with a couple tweaks, then tell you about four free apps you can download. And a tip of the hat to the amazing Gina Trapani at Lifehacker, from whom I picked up several of these tricks.

First the taskbar. Windows 7 lets you "pin" apps to the taskbar and we can approximate that in Vista. Here's how.

Right-click on your taskbar.

Select toolbars.

And choose Quick Launch.

Now drag the icons you wish to "pin" into the left side of the taskbar.

Right click on the taskbar again and uncheck "lock taskbar."

Now click on the three rows of dots, hold down the mouse, and drag the bar over until you see all your icons.

Now, they look a little small like that, so let's make them bigger. Make sure the taskbar is unlocked.

Now right click on the taskbar again.

Select the view menu and choose large icons.

That's OK. But if you want a real Mac-like dock, forget all that and install RocketDock. It gives you a whole new Macish dock that you can put down at the bottom of the window instead of the taskbar.

But your Windows still looks all Vista-y. One more interface tweak before we move on. Download VistaGlazz 1.3. It's a utility that changes some system files to allow you to implement third-party themes on Vista. Launch VistaGlazz and, if you're sure, agree to allow it to modify your system files. I did it, and had no issues. But I make no guarantee.

Sometimes it seems like you need to be a software engineer to understand how to keep Windows running smoothly. That's why I appreciate free utilities that collect various Windows settings and make the OS easier to customize.

Last May, I described two utilities that improve Vista's performance: Stardock's $20 Tweak Vista and Iolo Technologies' $40 System Mechanic. A week earlier, I wrote about two other Vista tweaking tools: the free Ultimate Windows Tweaker from Microsoft MVP Anand Khanse and WareSoft Software's $30 Vista Smoker Pro.

All four of these programs have their pluses and minuses, but I clearly preferred the two most expensive options. I'm still looking for a free Windows tweaking tool with the best features of the fee-based apps. I thought I found it in TweakNow PowerPack 2009, but despite some very nice touches, a couple of important features failed when I tested the beta of version 1.6.1.

Dozens of Windows tools at your fingertips
Among TweakNow PowerPack's many tools are disk and Registry cleaners, a memory optimizer, startup manager, uninstaller, and personal-information eraser. The program also makes all your system information easy to find, including your processor model and cache types and sizes, network settings, and Windows configuration.

TweakNow PowerPack 2009's Registry Cleaner provides information about the Registry entries it proposes to delete.

(Credit: Tweak Now)

If you're concerned about security (who isn't?), you'll find plenty of TweakNow options to your liking. For instance, you can set Windows to shut down after a set period and limit users' access to context-menu items, Control Panel applets, and Windows Explorer's Folder Options. You can also reduce the amount of time Windows waits before shutting down an unresponsive service or application, add or remove items from the Start menu and submenus, and insert a legal notice in the Welcome screen.

When you enable TweakNow PowerPack's RAM Optimizer, an icon is added to the taskbar's notification area (near the clock) that shows the percentage of memory currently in use. Hover over the icon to view your system's free RAM and the percentage of CPU cycles in use.

TweakNow PowerPack's RAM Optimizer shows the percentage of memory in use via a taskbar icon.

(Credit: Tweak Now)

Mixed up UAC tweaker and an uninstaller that doesn't
There are plenty of features to like in TweakNow PowerPack—I haven't even mentioned the program's ability to brand IE's Title Bar—but ultimately the utility failed in two important areas.

First, my repeated attempts to uninstall a virtualization program came up empty. After running the TweakNow uninstaller, the program prompted me to restart to complete the process. The shutdown took several minutes, but when my test machine restarted, the virtualization program was still in place. I eventually uninstalled the program using the free Revo Uninstaller utility I described in a post last week.

The second failure was more disturbing. After I changed TweakNow PowerPack's User Account Control setting from the default Medium to Strong, I wasn't able to revert to the Medium setting. (The Strong setting requires that you enter an administrator password whenever you attempt to perform an administrator-only activity, while the Medium setting needs only a single click to continue the process.)

I was able to change the TweakNow UAC setting to Weak, which removes the UAC prompt for most administrator operations. However, each time I reverted to the Medium option, the Strong setting was selected when I restarted the PC and reopened the program. I was ultimately able to get the Medium setting back via Vista's own Security Center applet.

Even with these glitches, I can see myself coming to rely on TweakNow PowerPack for most of my Windows maintenance chores—the program's Registry Cleaner is particularly handy. After all, you can't really expect any beta to be flawless, and there's a good chance the vendor will address the program's shortcomings in future updates.

Ruston Panabaker, Microsoft's principal program manager of strategic silicon partnering, shows how later builds of Windows 7 were able to let the processor enter low-power states for longer periods of time, saving more power.

(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET)

SAN FRANCISCO--Upgrading a newer machine from Windows Vista to Windows 7 might mean that you get to see the last few minutes of that DVD on a long flight.

At a demo on Tuesday, Microsoft showed two identical laptops playing the same DVD, with the Windows 7-equipped notebook getting 20 percent better battery life than one running Windows Vista. In general, users can expect newer systems running Windows 7 to offer 10 percent to 20 percent better battery improvement when watching a DVD.

"We're achieving a very significant amount of battery savings," said Microsoft principal program manager Ruston Panabaker.

Microsoft and Intel declined to say just how much overall battery life improvement Windows 7 might offer as compared to Vista, saying there are too many factors that can influence such results.

"I don't want to state a number," Panabaker said at the event, which was organized by Intel and Microsoft.

Microsoft and Intel showed these power consumption improvements results for a system running Windows 7, left, and Vista. The left chart shows consumption while the system was idle; at right, when playing a DVD.

(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET)

The event was designed to outline the joint work that the two halves of Wintel have been doing to make Windows 7 perform better in areas such as virtualization, power management, and performance.

On the performance side, Microsoft and Intel showed a reference system that can boot up in 11 seconds, although again real-world performance is likely to vary a lot based on what's inside the PC and how well tuned it is. For instance, the system shown Tuesday had a solid-state drive and other high-performance componets.

The move comes as Microsoft gears up for the October 22 launch of Windows 7.

Perhaps the most encouraging thing for Microsoft is the fact that Intel itself is willing to use Windows 7 within its own corporate walls. The chipmaker has been an XP-only shop throughout Vista's life. In an interview here, Intel VP Stephen Smith said that Intel had some internal applications that weren't Vista-compatible and the benefits of moving to Vista didn't justify the costs.

By contrast, Smith said several hundred people inside Intel are already running Windows 7 on their corporate machines.

CNET News' Stephen Shankland contributed to this report.

Playing a DVD, a Windows Vista Ultimate system, left showed an estimated battery life of 4.14 hours, but the Windows 7 Ultimate system on the right showed 5.5 hours.

(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET)

Microsoft recently released Windows Live Movie Maker for Vista. Those acquainted with Windows Movie Maker for XP or Vista may be scratching their heads right now--is this an update? Actually, Microsoft intended for it to be a distinct new product for Vista and Windows 7, though you may not guess it based on the almost-identical naming convention.

At any rate, a few points set Windows Live Movie Maker apart from its cousins. Its audience, for a start. While the free application was always intended for the average Windows user (as opposed to a prosumer or professional), this edition strives even more toward simplicity. With the AutoMovie button on board, you're able to create a movie from start to finish--using your photos and video clips--within a minute or two. The software automatically adds transitions, zoom and pan effects, and a title page. It also prompts you to add music. True, your final product may not be particularly creative or personal, but it's certainly a starting point, and making adjustments and embellishments after the fact is fairly easy.

Second, the Windows Live Movie Maker team wants to get movies off the computer and to their final destination--YouTube, Facebook, your Xbox, cell phone, a DVD, friend's e-mail in-box, or your TV. The sharing features are fairly expanded, and accessible with a click.

What the application achieves in accessibility, it loses in advanced features. There are some light audio and video-editing tools like fading and splitting, but not much beyond. Its basics will polarize those intermediate users who are ready to go into slightly more complex editing territory. It is worth noting that there are a few more movie formats supported on Windows 7. You should also be aware that the app installs as part of the Microsoft Essentials pack, but you can opt out of all else to install Windows Live Movie Maker alone.

To review all this information and more, check out the full Windows Live Movie Maker review. To watch us make a movie (not this one), watch the First Look video above.