Simon Hartcher

As part of my daily news crawl I came across a post on iTNews by Iain Thomson regarding the Windows 7 Upgrade Path:

Data released from Microsoft on the upgrade methods for Windows XP and Vista users makes it look as though users will have a tough time installing the new operating system.
A chart released to the Wall Street Journal shows that very few of the upgrade option open to users will be possible without serious changes.
Most, in fact, will require the complete wiping of the hard drive and an installation from scratch.

To paraphrase my comment on that post:

To be perfectly honest I don’t feel like Microsoft SHOULD provide an easy upgrade path from XP (a 10 year old OS!).
The amount of crap that would be accumulated over time on a PC running XP since its inception would be ridiculous. Anyone who knows anything about Windows XP would have done periodic clean installs anyway to get the best out of the operating system. They would have to be used to a backup scheme anyway, except now Microsoft will make it easier with [Windows Easy Transfer].

So what if people will have to do a clean install to move to Windows 7? As said above, unless you do regular clean installs with Windows XP you’re not getting the most out of it. It does not take long (6 months is usually the magic number) for slow boot times and visual performance issues to appear.

I am currently running the Windows 7 RTM which I upgraded on two of my home machines from Vista Ultimate and clean installed on my Home Theatre PC. The in-place upgrade process was quite simple and in the case of my laptop and HTPC I installed from a flash drive. Upgrading does take considerably longer than a clean install (about an hour in total on a fast machine compared to 30 minutes for a clean install) but all your programs, settings and documents are carried across in the upgrade. In all cases I have had only minor issues with program compatibility pertaining to image mounting software which can be solved by installing the latest version.

One thing I’m really excited about with Windows 7 is the performance on a lowspec machine like a netbook. A close friend of mine purchased a very competitively priced netbook that came with linux preinstalled. As much as I would be happy to use linux on a netbook due to my previous experience with it, my friend was not enjoying it as much as he should due to “Office Envy”. I helped him install Windows 7 on it using a flash drive (as his netbook does not have a DVD drive) and after failing the first time with the x64 version (he doesn’t have the hardware) we got 7 installed successfully in x86. It was really surprising (and gratifying) to see how well it ran on such a lowspec machine. The difference in boot and general reaction time between the netbook and my main machine at home was negligible. A job well done and a happy friend.

If you have stumbled here and want some help “upgrading” to Windows 7 from XP, take a look at this post on Scott Hanselman’s blog called Step-By-Step: How To "Upgrade" from Windows XP to Windows 7.