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Why Did Microsoft Make It So Difficult?
The big question everyone asks is: Why did Microsoft make an XP-to-7 upgrade impossible? There's two major reasons for this -- one relatively new, and the other all-too-familiar to people who've tried to perform an upgrade install and augured headfirst into a wall.
- Upgrade installs are notoriously flaky by nature. Many people report problems with upgrade installs that never show up in clean installs, if only because there are that many less variables to account for in the latter. I've had plenty of these issues on my own, to the point where my own personal rule is to never do this, since it creates at least as many problems as it allegedly solves.
- The sheer number of under-the-hood differences between XP and 7 makes an in-place upgrade infeasible. The general rule of thumb with such things is that you can only upgrade one generation at a time: XP to Vista, Vista to 7, but not XP to 7.
Keep in mind, this has nothing to do with whether or not you can buy the upgrade edition media of Windows 7 and use that to upgrade an existing XP PC. You can do that just fine -- you just won't be able to use your existing XP installation. You'll have to migrate or back up your data, and then install 7 in parallel or wipe everything clean.
There's a few other caveats worth pointing out, too. Not everyone may run into them, but they've surfaced through my own experiences, and may be relevant here:
- You cannot upgrade any 32-bit version of Windows directly to a 64-bit version. You have to do a clean install. Parallel installs are okay, though.
- You can't perform an in-place upgrade of any kind by booting from the DVD, even if you have a valid OS for an in-place upgrade. You have to boot the operating system you want to upgrade, then insert the DVD and run the upgrade.
- You can't upgrade from a pre-release version of 7 to the final version of 7. There, you'll also need to do a clean install.
- And no, upgrading from XP to Vista and then Vista to 7 is not advisable either -- aside from being a complete waste of a Vista license, it's bound to introduce so much flakiness as to make it not worth the trouble.
Now that you have some idea of the dimensions of the problem, it's time for some solutions.
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