Windows 7 Install, an update

My attempt to install Vista SP1 (a pre-requisite for "updating to Win 7") failed miserably. I wasted at least 10 hours trying that effort. Microsoft has no clue on how to design a good software. Here's my two pet peeves:

1. If you already have an OS installed, and want to leap frog from current OS to go to the latest OS, why do I have to jump through hoops to install a Service Pack for an older OS that I no longer need?

2. Win OS install is known as notoriously take a long time to install (several hours) and for the average people require your attendance to enter "clicks" every so often, and then just near the end it would say, "oops, there has been an error of some sort, and rolling back the changes. Why can't these programmers do all the checks AHEAD of time, and not go through the motion of copying fies, creating restore points, installing stuff and then discover that it cannot go forward and have to roll back hours later?

I called Microsoft SP1 install support line (just shows you that many people must have encountered problem installing if they had to create a special link in their website to support this functionality!!!!!!). Mahendra took over control of the laptop remotely, and proceeded to go through the steps I already have tried, and was unable to install SP1. He suggested that I insert the original Dell OS disk (well, it didn't come with one, the OS is pre-installed). He said that one of the system file is corrupted. You'd think that Microsoft would know which file is bad, and say so when it does it's file scan, but Mahendra could not tell me. Mind you that at the time, the Vista OS laptop was working fine with no indication of any problem. One thing he suggested was to do a full/clean install of Win 7 without re-formatting, using the "Custom" option. I didn't know this capability and thus have not tried it prior to this time.

So I backed up all the data, did the custom install, and 3 hours later I was able to re-start and it came up with Windows 7. I then had to re-install all the apllications software, restore all data files and so far it is working fine.

One thing I do like is that Win7 is faster than Vista, and it eliminated the annoying screen blankings during boot up or waking up from sleep. In the past, when I opened the laptop froma sleep, I'd get the last window to pop up quickly, then it woudl blank out for a minute or so, pops up again for a second, blank again, for few more seconds, and finally ready to use. Of, the windows Media Player is much improved and had a built in menu for bringing up live TV, if you have one of those USB TV tuner. Vista was a dog performance wise, like the previous Windows intermediate products (ME, CE, 98, etc.)