Windows 7 - Windows Vista Home Premium 64 to Windows 7 Ultimate 64

In October, with the official release, will I be able to upgrade my Windows Vista Home Premium to Windows 7 Ultimate, without doing a clean install ?

This will mean I will not have to do a reinstall of all my applications and games.

NOTE1: Important data is backed up to an external drive.
NOTE2: My current home PC is only 6 month's old.

Home PC Specs: i7 920/6 Gb RAM/HD 4870 512/160 GB HDD (10,000rpm)/26" LCD

Yes, Vista Home Premium to 7 Ultimate is a supported upgrade path.

Hope this helps

Scott

Ditto on Webadict's post, and the Upgrade process has been well refined in Windows 7 and is nowhere near as buggy as it once was.
In fact, I have "Officially" changed my long standing recommendation on the upgrade process from "Don't Do IT.." to go ahead, should be just fine. We did an extensive study on the upgrade process back in XP days at another Tech forum I Admin'd, and in over 70% of the systems we tested, there were deal breaking bugs that could not be explained any other way than a buggy upgrade.
I did upgrades on 8 Windows 7 builds pre-RC, and every one worked perfectly.

And that was because XP was doing stupid things both internally as well as externally - internally in terms of M$ changing things on the fly with relation to the kernel, and externally, in terms of AV companies also changing things with Kernel level code (or access to such code) preventing good upgrades.

In fact, IIRC, XP to other OS upgrade worked best when you took XP and install it as green as the day it was installed the very first time on your machine, *didn't* upggrade (except for SP2) and then performed the upgrade.

Windows 7 - that is a different story - unless you have specific hardware / software blocks, it upgrades perfectly fine.

I have a HP laptop (Tablet PC) that I have upgraded from Vista Business to Builds 7000 - 7077, then I formatted, reinstalled Vista and upgraded directly to RC. Never once had an issue after I removed the driver for the fingerprint reader and the active secure measures of the onboard TPM module....and both were perfectly installed after the upgrade every time.

Microsoft reports there is no direct upgrade path to 7 Ultimate from a non-like version. Unfortunately, you will need to do a clean install. For some reason, this is only with Ultimate.

Other cases where a clean install is necessary:

• Going from a greater version to a lesser version of 7.
• Going from x86 to x64 or the other way around.

Its my understanding that Windows 7 Ultimate is so different from Vista Ultimate that a clean install is necessary. I attempted to do an upgrade from Vista Ultimate to 7 Ultimate and it forced me to do a clean install with my files being placed in a directory named windows.old. I tried it so often I had a windows.old.004! That was a nightmare! Good luck.

-J
MCP, MCSA, MCSE, VCP.

So it can't be done.

If I am going to be doing a clean install then, i.e. wipe the existing hard disk completely of the old system. (After backing up to an external harddisk) and then re-formating, how does it know I am doing a upgrade as opposed to new install.

At what point does it check that I have existing copy, when I have formatted the drive as part of the install.

Is there a detailed upgrade procedure ? including existing licence check.

Otherwise is it easier if I simply buy a Full Product and not an upgrade.

You won't have to backup your files or format the drive. Follow these steps:

From within the operating system, insert the new DVD.
Autorun will launch the installer.
Choose install.
Choose clean install.
This option will install the OS cleanly but will will move all your existing files to a directory named windows.old.
From there, you can complete the install and then move your files from the windows.old directory to your current pictures, music, documents directories.
The only way you will loose your files is if you choose the format option.

If you have any questions during the installation, email me at sightframe at gmail

Good Luck,

-J
MCP, MCSA, MCSE

I know I don't need to to format drive, but what if I want. i.e. like a fresh new computer.

Follow instructions given by jhwhiteh, then choose reformat from the menu. The installation process has already determined that you have a copy of the system you are attempting to upgrade from, and at this point will allow you to do a clean install.

And then a subsequent re-install on a new larger disk later.