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So last week I decided that I would do something really nice for my partner and get our computer guy to upgrade Steve's main computer from XP to Windows 7.

Sure, his computer was working fine but it was struggling with the load of running all the stuff that Steve likes to run at the same time. A normal day for Steve is to have Photoshop, Dreamweaver, Excel, Word, Internet Explorer and anything up to 20 tabs of Firefox open all at once ... oh and I shouldn't forget to mention all that other stuff that he keeps running in the background.

Somehow XP with 2gb of RAM managed to cope with that but sometimes it got a little slow and rebooting ... Steve would leave it all running for days at a time ... took a while so I decided to treat him to an upgrade.

I didn't want to totally freak him out so I thought we would just go with a software upgrade and increase the RAM and work with the motherboard that's already in the box. So while we were away over the weekend I had our computer guy check it out and on Monday he said that the motherboard could handle the upgrade.

I still had to convince Steve that it was the right thing to do ... he's a bit conservative when it comes to things like upgrades ... but then on Monday morning the decision was taken out of Steve's hands when he somehow managed to corrupt the Registry files while he was doing a large backup.

So on Tuesday ... while we were away again ... the upgrade happened. Was it a success? Well sort of ... some things that we thought would work fine turned out to not work at all and maybe there are some lessons in what we did that can help you if you want to upgrade.

Yes, the motherboard works fine with Windows 7 even though it is a few years old. What didn't work was the second graphic card because there were no Windows 7 drivers for twin graphic cards on this particular motherboard so Steve ended up losing two of his monitors.

The only way to fix that problem is to install a new motherboard with newer video cards but we just don't have time to do that right now. With all the stuff that Steve runs on his computers it takes a many hours just to reload them and that puts him way behind with all the work he handles for me.

Backups are always a problem if you're going to upgrade your computer and even though you may keep some backups on a regular basis there will always be files that you should backup but don't ... and then when you're about to upgrade your computer they become a hassle.

When you reach that point you really only have two choices ... you either suck it down Princess and spend time doing those backups ... or you do what we chose to do. Even though the old hard drive was in perfect condition we opted for a new hard drive and left the old one in box as a slave unit. Suddenly we had a backup of all Steve's important files.

And what about all those programs that you run on your computer ... and the Fire Fox and Chrome plugins? Do you have a list of those plugins stashed away somewhere and have you kept all the zips for the programs that you have downloaded?

If you don't have a list of your plugins and you're not keeping backup copies of all those zips then you really should. It took Steve almost a day to get his computer set up and functioning again and he had details of all those extra programs and plugins. Imagine how much longer it's going to take you get back to work if you have to go looking online for all of that stuff?

Cost is also something that you need to think about before you jump into an upgrade. There were a number of programs that we use that work fine on XP but simply don't run on Windows 7 and the cost of moving up to those new programs was expensive ... but I was prepared for that cost. Others may not be prepared for the cost and it can be a rude shock to find that an important piece of software won't even open after you've upgraded your operating system.

And now we're on day two and Steve is working like a madman to catch up ... there are still some glitches and the upgraded computer isn't seeing the network but some of the programs on other computers in the network are seeing the upgraded box ... but we'll work on fixing those later. Obviously he's missing those extra monitors too but for now Steve is just happy to be able to work with a computer that runs much faster than the old one did.

So if you're thinking of upgrading then be sure to plan for it and don't just wake up one morning and decide to do it there and then. Understand that you must back up all your files before you start and that there will be a loss of production time while you're doing the upgrade too. And if you're doing the upgrade yourself then expect it to take longer than you allowed for.

When the job is done and the computer is running again you may be very happy with the upgrade but when you're in the middle of sorting everything out you can begin to wish you had never started.