Pre-Order Windows 7 Home Premium Upgrade: $49.99

The most reliable PCs in our house run Windows XP SP-3. We skipped Vista, but at this price, I think I'll upgrade a couple of them to Windows 7.
Update - the Windows 7 Upgrade Advisor ran for hours before I canceled it - maybe I'll pass on Win-7 until I get a new system after all.

Note that this price is only good until 11 July, 2009.

Windows 7 Home Premium Pre-Order, $49.99 Upgrade, $199.99 Full | PCMech:
" . . . if you pre-order Windows 7 as an upgrade, the Home Premium Edition (which is what most people would go for) is just a tick under $50."

IBM ThinkPad R31 laptop hard drive upgrade

Our ThinkPad has been acting really cranky lately, and I discovered it had only 3% of the (20 GB) disk space available. Deleting and zipping some files gained very little space – easily swallowed up by the next WinXP update. It was time for a new hard drive. Checking online, I found that “4 All Memory” had 160 GB drives available for the R31.

Like most, our laptop only accepts one hard drive at a time, so the common desktop method of installing the new drive and copying the old one won’t work. I downloaded the DriveImage XML software (free for home use) and started learning how to make a drive image. The plan was to copy the 20GB drive to an external, USB drive, and then copy that image back to new drive (after it was installed). Because there is no space left on the old drive, and because it wouldn’t be available to restore the image anyway, I decide to load the software on a bootable CD-R disk.

DriveImage XML recommends the Bart PE – PE Builder software because it creates a bootable WinXP disc that runs a graphical environment. The very first CD I burned was bootable, but I had forgotten to download and install the DriveImage XML plug-in. The 2nd disc booted, loaded DriveImage XML, and successfully created the drive image on the external drive – this took about 5 hours. After installing the new drive, I tried to restore the image – the software, quite reasonably, expected the new drive to be partitioned before proceeding. DriveImage recommended a couple of methods to partition the drive, but none worked for me.

I finally swapped the laptop's CD drive for a floppy drive and broke out the old Partition Magic diskettes. After a couple of false starts it began the partitioning process – this was about 10% complete after an hour, so I went to bed.

In the morning with the Primary partition created & set to active, I swapped the CD drive back in and rebooted to run DriveImage XML again. This time everything appeared to be working. The status screen didn’t show much, but about 5 hours later (about the same time as it took to create the image – probably limited by the USB 1 port speed) . . . It copied correctly, but wouldn’t boot. Fortunately, after googling a while, I learned I could boot from a WinXP CD and in the Repair mode, enter the "fixmbr" command. It now appears to be running as before, but with a much larger disk drive (and no cranky behavior).