*** From the Archives ***
This article is from October 23, 2009, and is no longer current.
Windows 7 Now Available: What You Need to Know.
As a Windows fan, I’m quite excited about yesterday’s official launch of Windows 7. I’ve been running the beta and release candidate for a while now and CS3 and CS4 both run nicely on it. So, for the first ever I’m upgrading Windows immediately upon release. If you’re thinking of doing the same, here are few items you might want to be aware of.
If you’re going to do this here are some items to be aware of.
Deactivate Your Software
Make a check list of all your programs. Creative Suite applications can be deactivated from the help menu. If you have the suite, deactivating from any application will deactivate the suite. If you have individual products, they’ll all need to be deactivated individually.
Upgrade vs. Clean Install
Simple. Don’t do an in place upgrade.
It may save you a bit of time up front but you’re very likely to have some major headaches down the road. Stick to a clean install even if you’re using upgrade media.
Macs with Boot Camp
Unless you totally blow out the Boot Camp partition and start clean there’s a couple of things to be aware of.
Apple is not officially supporting this, yet. They have a note on their website saying they will support it later this year with a Boot Camp update. I wasn’t going to be deterred by something like that so I gave it a try and found out why it’s not supported. The Boot Camp services prevent the setup files from being written to disk.
There’s a way around that, too. Before trying to do the upgrade, make sure to run the Add/Remove Programs Control Panel and uninstall Boot Camp Services.
Once I did that, Windows 7 went on its merry way. The installation requires a couple of reboots, so you might want to set your machine to default to Windows before doing the upgrade. Otherwise you’ll need to baby sit the installation and hold the option key down to get it boot properly.
Creative Suite Support
With the release of Windows 7, Adobe has updated it’s Creative Suite FAQ which notes full support for Windows 7 with no required patches. They also note that CS3 has been part of the testing process.
That’s it for now. The MacBook is running just fine, but I haven’t done my desktop yet.
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Thanks for the tips, I’m interested to see the differences of Windows 7 over Vista. Needless to say I’ll be happy to upgrade Vista. Glad Adobe is up to date as well, I wonder if the update will make use of more of my computer’s resources.
I’ve been running the Win7 x64 RC since April, and it has worked like a charm. The RC will begin to time-out in March, so before then I must drag myself to buy the commercial version and do the reinstall dance — but I’ve been so happy with the RC that I almost look forward to doing the reinstall dance. Almost. :-)
To those still on XP or Vista (which worked quite well for me, actually) I’d say you should run, not walk, to your nearest computer store — Win7 is Windows the Reliable, Responsible, Handsome Grown-Up OS.
While you’re at the ‘puter store, plunk down the money for an SSD drive — they’re quite affordable now, and once you’ve run your system on a SSD for a week, you’d *never* go back to using ol’ hard drives for anything but cheap, massive storage.
Something else worth noting is that according a few reports, as well as my own experience, the upgrade disks are quite capable of clean installs without jumping through hoops.
You suggest deactivating Adobe software prior to the migration process. But Adobe says about reformatting the hard drive (which is part of installing the OS), that only low-level reformatting leads to losing the activation.
AFAIK installing an OS involves only high-level formatting, so reactivation should not be necessary.
Which is true?
Here is the link I am referring to: https://kb2.adobe.com/cps/100/1008779.html#noteeight
I’m a firm believer in not taking any chances. You’ll be far more inconvenienced if you lose that activation.
Deactivating takes seconds.
Bob,
Thanks for the tip on getting Bootcamp drivers to load, but I’m not following the steps. You say uninstall Bootcamp from the Add/Remove, but it wasn’t added at all yet in a fresh Win7 install, so how/why remove it?
The problem exists if you already have Windows Vista or XP installed in Boot Camp and attempt to launch the installer.
As soon as it tries to write files to the harddrive it stops.
If you’ve gotten Win 7 installed you’re all set. Pop the OSX DVD in and load the Boot Camp drivers.
What is the major difference between vista and windows 7, I just heard it is much faster then vista. and also microsoft promotion by hosting party?
Okay, Bob, thanks for your advice. I think, I’ll just go ahead and deactivate. With 20 possible activations altogether I probably shouldn’t take a risk.
Keep in mind that even if you blow through those 20 activations (which would take quite an effort) you can still call Adobe and get a new activation code.
Fairly plain sailing here on Win7 x64 and CS4 (both fully updated).
Annoyances so far:
1. Illustrator sometimes crashes when launched via ‘Edit Original’ from ID.
2. ID can’t print directly to PDF. Message: “Printing Error. Problem initialising the current printer. Check the system print settings”. Check ’em for what, it doesn’t say. ID is the only app to have this problem. Clearing prefs doesn’t help. Printing to a postscript file gives me an error about insufficient memory or disk space. Free RAM: 10GB, free disk space ~1TB. Reality check please, Adobe. Export to PDF works fine. Have to hope the ‘Postscript File’ driver will do the trick for now.
Hoorahs so far:
1. Interface somehow looks much cleaner under Win7 than it did in XP x64.
2. Bridge seems less flakey, though time will tell.
3. The ‘libraries’ feature of Win7 lets you collect links to every work folders in one place. Fantastic timesaver.
4. Each app pinned to the start menu gets its own ‘recent documents’ menu. Very handy for launching distiller, etc.
David,
I’m having no such issues here, though I had to actually try the print to PDF thing.
Why are you doing that? Export is, and has been, the recommended method for PDF creation for many years.
It is? Durn, I must have got the wrong end of the stick reading older posts — not for the first time :-) Always thought print was better than export!
Here’s another piece of fun: files that I can’t save because they’re owned by the Administrator (or actually some codename that I think represents my old XP user account), even though I’ve never opened these files until now in Win7. A quick copy to a new file, delete the old one, then rename, does the trick. But it’s a big irritant.
Once again David, I’m not seeing anything like that here. Sounds like you’ve got some system issues there.
A few things.
I know EVERYONE is insisting that a clean install MUST be better, but I have to tell you that I did an “in place” upgrade from Vista to Win7 and then after using it for a few days (oh and this is on build 7100) I did a clean install.
So the upgrade took 2 hours and 20 minutes. Quite a long time, but after that EVERYTHING just worked. Seriously EVERYTHING.
The clean install took less than 20 minutes, but then I had to reinstall all my apps which took much longer than 2 hours.
I noticed no speed difference, so I would actually recommend the upgrade in place.
The best thing about Win 7 is that we finally upgraded our graphic designer from her 2-yr-old Mac that was dying (hardware) to a much faster and cheaper PC laptop that synchronises seamlessly on our network so that she can work from home and have all her files properly synced.
Raphael, thanks for noting your experience, but it is atypical and while it certainly takes longer to do a clean install followed by reinstall of applications, it starts you off with a pristine configurations.
I’m sticking with my advice. A clean install is an investment in time that you won’t be wasting troubleshooting down the road only to find that you should have done the clean install to begin with.
@Bob: right, I finally found out what the problem was. When I migrated, it was a clean install on the system drive, but I left the RAID data drives unchanged — not something I want to rebuild unless strictly necessary!
Despite the fact that my username was the same under XP and Win7, and that both were members of the Administrators group (yeah, bad security, I know!), it decided to turn all files owned by my XP incarnation over to a ‘ghost’ user with a long codename. I guess that’s Win7’s way of porting over old users on a clean install, when you don’t maintain user credentials etc on a network server. I had to change ownership and editing rights across all my data disks, at which point Indesign started playing ball again. At least ownership and rights changes on folders/files/disks are pretty easy in Win7.
Strange, but true.
I need help guys, i just installed windows 7 32bit on my laptop and windows 7 64 bit on my PC and both i installed on both of them indesign CS3, but on both of them the indd files icon doesn’t appear but when i click on any indd file it opens normally with indesign cs3 but i need to the indd files to have its normal ic…on like on any other operating systm but on windows 7 32bit and 64bit i have the icon of open with assigned to all the indd files and i tryed to use windows7 manager to change the icon, it didn’t work
@Ahmad: These instruction are for Vista 64 but should work with CS3 on Win 7 64 bit:
Open a command shell with Administrator Privileges by right clicking the cmd.exe application and choosing to Run As Administrator.
Navigate to the Program Files (x86)\Common\Adobe\Shell folder. Type the name of the .bat file, ” Register64BitIcons.bat” (without quotations) and press Enter
That said, you may have something else going on since this shouldn’t be an issue on Win 7 32 bit.
@ Bob Levine
thanks alot, it works like a charm
@Bob Levine, or @Ahmed, can you guys please explain these instructions? I’ve been searching for days to solve this problem, and have found this answer, but don’t understand.
I get opening the comand shell, how do i navigate to the correct place? when i type “register64biticons.bat” in cmd, nothing happens…. this seems easy, but i’m just missing a step. help please! Thanks.
The CMD shell only accepts DOS commands. You can’t really navigate like you do in Windows, you just type the command line in.
You’ll see a c:\ prompt at which time you can just type “cd\Program Files (x86)\Common\Adobe\Shell” without the quotes.
Hope that helps.