Initially went surprisingly well. It was an upgrade disc for the Ultimate edition acquired for $20 from my school teacher son (yeah, I'm now an honorary teacher). The manufacturer had not listed the model as compatible with Win7 but the MS check showed that it was likely to work.

The plan was to install an SSD for the new OS and one was found for $179 for 256 gig. $15 for a frame. It projected too far however to close the case so it's now just resting in the frame with a bit of foam padding between the frame and case.

Had to go into BIOS and turn on another SATA port before it was recognised.

The upgrade process allowed 7 to be installed on the SSD. That allowed dual-boot which was pleasing; can keep the old XP system til the new one is properly sorted.

Over the next few days things got complicated. There was no Hibernate option. That took a video driver update. Then Hibernate and Sleep would work but immediately wake up again. Had to turn off network driver wake-up calls. There was no Win7 driver for the film scanner; it failed to work in compatibility mode; the workarounds described on the web failed to work, er, around it. Bought a generic scanning package, VueScan, which works but needs careful calibration and lacks some of the inbuilt cleaning options of the OEM. I still have the option of using the scanner in the disconnected XP virtual machine though.

Word was that the multifunction printer had no 7 driver but lo and behold one installed on the first start up. And on every reboot since, so for the mo it's a matter of deleting each duplicate.

I took the opportunity to restructure the image folders - looking forward to some more serious digital shooting and editing - and found that the folders for two outback trips had vanished. The automatic cloud backup program I found out too late doesn't do incremental or differential, just a plain copy. And only keeps copies of deleted files for 30 days There was an external drive backup of all data files but I'd deleted that once the 7 upgrade was done and the originals transferred to the SSD (and Recuva couldn't unearth them). Luckily one folder was found on the laptop but the other's gone forever. I think this is called learning the hard way.

So far the biggest improvement hasn't been the OS but the SSD. It's kind of weird working without the background mumbling of a spinning drive but it's a helluva lot faster.