Well, I have carried on with this task since I installed 7 onto my home PC a couple of days ago. So far it has been reasonably straightforward. The following are points of contention/issue that have been encountered:
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Even if you are the administrator of the computer, you aren’t automatically granted full permissions onto other hard drives in the system. You have to grant those permissions to yourself before you can change files on those drives. (This was also the case when I changed from XP to Vista with a clean install. 7 can’t upgrade directly from XP so you haven’t got any possibility that the upgrade setup might automatically address this issue)
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Some applications like Picasa and IrfanView aren’t picking up the changes to My Pictures and other shell folder locations even though I have made the changes in the Library properties. It looks like either they are using the Shell Folder registry keys (now deprecated) or the API call that applications are supposed to make isn’t returning the correct location.
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My Canon camera wouldn’t launch Canon CameraWindow when it was first plugged in after the installation of the original software and the Windows 7 update. I had to follow this procedure from Canon Support to get the autoplay settings of the camera to automatically launch CameraWindow (which has been updated). (I didn’t encounter any problems at work with this software because I didn’t install it as I use Explorer to access photos so that the camera’s per image “downloaded” flag is not reset)
However, Epson Scan was installed successfully and works as expected (using the update to the Vista version).
The Nero DVD drive software (it is a Sony IDE drive) is too old (as it was for Vista). I’m putting a new Sony Optiarc drive into the new computer when it is built and the software for this will be Vista compatible. The timeline for getting the new computer going is now about a month. The job got delayed a little due to other financial priorities but I will be ordering the remaining components (RAM, CPU, mainboard and HDD) over the next 4 weeks so that I will be able to get the assembly job done (in a friend’s home-based computer workshop) soon after that. I already have the case with the new power supply that I bought installed into it.
Reused Foxconn TS-001 chassis with new Enermax ATX2.1 power supply installed. When completed this will have 2 HDDs, DVD writer, CD writer and card reader installed in the bays to the right. These chassis use special square sided screws like the Compaq ones in their tool-less bay retention clips, but you can get by with ordinary computer screws or Compaq ones.