Can I Upgrade to Windows 7 in Place?

The following chart illustrates which previous versions of Windows Vista can be upgraded-in-place to Windows 7. Regretfully, there is no upgrade-in-place solution for Windows Xp users.

What Advantage is There in Doing a Clean Install, Even Though an In-Place Upgrade is Available?

Clean installations involve completely reformatting the hard drive the current installation is on. Even when an upgrade is possible, a clean install has a few advantages which make the idea attractive.

• Eliminate unused processes and registry entries which cause performance problems.
• Virtually guarantee any viruses, trojans, and spyware will be removed.
• Reduction in drive space use from elimination of unused files and programs.

How much longer will Microsoft Support Windows XP?

Through 2014. The advantage here is that the business community, as a whole, did not endorse Vista. This puts Microsoft in the position of having to extend the support on XP much longer than it would have if Vista had received wide acceptance. The bigger issue will be how much longer applications providers will port their products to XP -- which may or may not prove to be a shorter period. But considering there are a half billion or so installations of XP today, unless the adoption of Windows 7 is widespread and rapid, software vendors around the world will have to support XP for many years just to compete. There is no big hurry.

Isn't Windows 7 Just a Repackaged Vista?

Yes and no. The look and feel of Vista has been carried over to Windows 7. So the advantage for those who've already made the switch to Vista is that your transition to the Windows 7 environment will be much easier. Microsoft contends the security controls in Windows 7 are not nearly as difficult or annoying to deal with. Vista users are familiar with the User Account Control (UAC) box that pops up every single time a change to the Windows directory occurs, an application gets installed, the registry is changed, etc. But 40% of the time the box popped up while doing installation of Windows "signed" updates to Windows. Boxes popped up left and right to the extent where it has been estimated that 90% of the time a user would say "Yes" to allowing a program to proceed even if the user does not know what the box is asking permission to do. Windows 7 is supposed to reduce this by not popping the UAC up everytime a program, Windows directory, or registry change occurs. Time will tell.

Windows 7 has added many features to improve productivity. "Snap" allows the user to drag a window to the left or right screen borders and the window will automatically resize to a half screen width tile. Drag another window to the opposite side and the same occurs there. Two drags of the mouse yield two perfectly sized pages of info without grabbing corners of boxes and the process of tedious manual resizing routine has been simplified.

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