One huge thing i forgot
Make sure you pre-download your network drivers BEFORE you install. Store them on a flash disk, portable drive, or burn them to dvd.
One of the biggest mistakes people make are forgetting these drivers. Most windows installation media will include some network drivers but not all of them and you dont want to be caught with your only pc with no drivers and no network access to download them. There is a box in windows update you can check that allows windows update to download some drivers but not all of them will be found here.
On OEM computers, you can go to the manufacturer’s website and download the latest drivers. If you know what your device is and who makes it, like an nvidia or AMD video card, you can go to their site and download drivers. Intel really makes things easy with the intel driver update tool. This site will cover most, if not all, of your intel drivers .
Good point on the network drivers. Shouldn’t be an issue, but why take chances? I had secondary internet access and a big flash drive for such emergencies, but not everyone will be in that boat.
I’m going to try the Windows Update Downloader for my next reinstall, might even slipstream it with the installation. The number of updates for a clean install of W7 SP1 is mind boggling.
If the OP is on a budget, you can do what we did and clean install W7 on off lease machines with wiped drives. We are running Home Premium and Ultimate on Core 2 Duo 2.8 Ghz workstations with 4 and 8 gigs of RAM, and they are plenty fast enough for us, the 750GB hard drives seem roomy, and we got them for a song. Not the latest and greatest by any stretch of the imagination, but a huge step up from the venerable Dell 4550s we were running XP on.
Oh, and if you haven’t purchased the OS yet, my kid runs W8 and loves it, and as others have pointed out, if you don’t like the PlaySkool interface you can change it.