Windows XP To 7 - No Upgrade Path & There Shouldn’t Be One

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Like you said, its never been recommended. Although MS has the technology scattered around in various tools that they could make a successful upgrade if they devoted enough time to it.

Maybe it would take too long for the user, or maybe just too many man hours to test all the possible issues. I don’t know, but its never really been a priority for them. I’m sure there are too many thousands of man hours used up just getting a standard install to work!

Agreed - rather than being a bad thing, the need to perform a clean-install should be positioned as an opportunity to have a good clear-out and start again. The thought of bringing all the crud that has built up with XP to Win7 makes me shudder. I’ve personally really enjoyed running both the beta and RC of Win7 (clean install for both) - both have run like a dream compared to XP which was on my laptop when I purchased it (therefore your comment “I would seriously doubt that any XP box, if it came preinstalled with XP, would even be supported by Windows 7″ isn’t strictly true - although I had previously upgraded the RAM from 1GB to 2GB)..

Fourth: Why the hell would you sink another $150 into a system with a working copy of XP?

I have a feeling that Windows 7 probably still won’t steal XP’s thunder. People are cutting corners, not looking for ways to spend money to replace something that works. In any event, it couldn’t possibly do any worse than Vista.

I’m sure Microsoft will start doing nasty things to XP users just as soon as they think they can get away with it. Like the no more Windows Live Messenger for XP x64 users.(Boo hoo)

Heh Ryan,
Good point. I agree.
Regards, Ron

If I was running the universe we’d all be camping out on Windows 2000 and complainers would be shot.

Vista/7 are the poster children for bullet point engineering.

I spent a good 3 hours walking my dad through Ubuntu over the phone a couple days ago when Vista Basic on his Acer laptop (just an email/browsing system) pushed him just a little too far. B-)

Then there’s that little “silent elevation” attack that Windows 7 is vulnerable to unless you crank the UAC alerts up to where they were with Vista. You may as well just either crank it up or shut it off, because the way Microsoft has it set you get the best of both worlds. A welcome mat to hackers and a nuisance every other time you click on something.

I really can’t wait to see how long it takes before we see a surge in malware that has no effect on Vista but pwns millions of Windows 7 users cause of that. Any bets?

I want to spank those people over at 4sysops who apologize for Vista, it’s earned every bit of flak it’s gotten and then some.

But this argument is fallacious.
“…upgrading from any version of Windows to a higher version has always been considered ludicrous”,

Perhaps to you it is “ludicrous”, and has “always been” so.
Perhaps I agree, as an IT admin, that fresh installs are always better.

But your article sounds dubiously like a prompt by Dell… a la, ‘Please just buy new hardware… you’ll need it anyway.’

It is a big deal to most folks, however (who may not be “like us”). They are our parents and grandparents.. the non-IT-inclined neighbor next door.. or simply those affected by this downturned-economy who need a cheaper, upgrade version.

And why should we expect to have such hardware throw-away systems in a matter of a couple of years?

I think the question should focus more there.

Hello Jeff.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts with us.

Actually Windows 7 Uses less resources than vista so it probably could run windows 7