Installing the operating system

Windows 7 OEM 64-bit

Now that we have checked out the BIOS, we can get down to installing the operating system.  We are going to use Windows 7, but there are still some choices to make.  First, we need the 64-bit version, because our system has more than 4GB of memory.  Second, we don't need the retail version but can get by with the OEM (Original Equipment Manufacturer) version, which is much cheaper.  The difference is that the OEM version can only be installed on one computer, once, but that's all we need.  Also, the OEM version comes in a plain package with no manual, but installing it is very easy - just put the CD into the drive and restart the machine.

Our first Windows screen

After a while we got screens appearing to set up a few things in the Windows installation, like the language we wanted to use, and soon after that we were creating the admin account for our new computer.  Also, this is the point where we had to choose a name for the computer - this led to a lot of debate and maybe we should have thought about it in advance!

We had a choice of which hard drive we installed Windows to, and chose the solid state drive - that way the computer should boot up more quickly.  This means we still have the big conventional drive that isn't ready to use, but we'll deal with that next.