New Years day Windows 7 64 bit conversion tale (not much to tell, fortunately)

Upgraded my Lenovo X61s to Windows 7 64 bit. Had to do a complete reinstall rather than a simple upgrade because I was running Vista 32 bit. Everything went smoothly. A few points that might be useful:

1. I went out and bought a new harddrive. The Lenovo makes it simply to replace the harddrive and BestBuy had a 320gB version running at 7,200 rpm for just over $100. Great preventative maintenance.

2. Installed Win 7 Pro on the new hard drive. Took a surprisingly short amount of time to do this. Closer to 30 minutes than an hour.

3. Installed Mozy and downloaded from my most recent Mozy backup the essential files I needed.

4. Installed my copy of Office 2007. Again, no issues.

5. Found, to my great surprise, that it was easy to reinstall all the programs I use. The only disks I needed were for Office. Other programs included:

Google Chrome
Google Picasa
QuickBooks 2010 (way faster than 2009)
Fasttrack Schedule
MindManager
Adobe Acrobat
Adobe Dreamweaver
Skype
iTunes
Microsoft Mesh
BlackBerry Desktop
Postbox
and Evernote!

Only the Adobe products required deauthorization from the other computer, which is really just the other harddrive. Because I'd kept the old drive intact, it was a simple matter to switch it in again and reboot.

Still more files to take down from Mozy as needed but I think I'm good to go.

I had been quite happy with Vista, but Win 7 is so much faster on startup, shutdown and in operation.

Update: Quickbooks wasn't as easy as I'd thought. Of course I need to get a code from the company and you have to phone them for that. And of course they weren't open on Friday, January 1. And they aren't open weekends either. Adobe, as noted above and in contrast, simply lets you deactivate the previous version of the machine so that you can reactivate the software on the "new" machine. I guess Intuit likes that cost of a human touch.