Installing free 7 upgrade to be shipped in October

I have a new OEM Vista Home Premium computer that qualifies for a free upgrade to 7. I registered in August and am expecting a CD to arrive in the next month, hopefully.

I know a clean install usually works better than an upgrade, but I don't know if it can be done with the CD they will be shipping. I'm hoping so.

I was just wondering if anyone here knows what to expect from our friends at Microsoft. Is it going to be a full version, or are we going to end up with a patchwork kludge of an OS?

Nobody really knows because Microsoft likes to keep this information secret until what seems like release day.

At this point most of us assume you will be able to clean install the full version using the upgrade media. Simply because of the fact that Windows 2000 or XP could not be upgraded to 7 by doing an in-place upgrade. Also you cannot upgrade a 32-bit version to 64-bit version (or vice versa) without doing a clean install.

Microsoft has stated that you can do a clean install using the upgrade media. What is not clear is the procedure for doing so.


So far it seems that:

A) a previous version of 2000, XP or Vista must be installed and genuine in order for the upgrade to work (but 2000 cannot be activated, so that's also unclear)
B) you might be required to install Windows 7 on the same partition that the previous OS was installed to (although I think this is unlikely)

chuckr said:

You probably won't be receiving any CD from Microsoft.

Most likely, you'll get a DVD or two.

Okay, DVDs will do just fine (I guess I shouldn't use "CD" like a ubiquitous name for those 5½" optical disks).

chuckr said:

I would interpret an "upgrade" to be precisely that.

I doubt very much that your DVD(s) would be a "patchwork kludge of an OS",
but instead will be a very sophisticated install process, dependent upon exactly what they ship.
The final result should be a successful install of what will-be one of the world's most popular 'Operating Systems'.

Sounds wonderful, I can't wait. I didn't mean the shipped software might be a patchwork kludge, I was referring to what has been the result of some Upgrades in the past, where they were buggy and a clean install was a much better option. Windows 3.1 to windows 95, or Windows 98 to XP for example. I have heard mostly good things about 7.

chuckr said:

Are you somewhat familiar with "patching software" ?

Only from the user end. I understand that software has to be designed to be patchable, because no matter how many wrenches developers throw into the works, there's no way to find all of the vulnerabilities before they have to release it.

I didn't mean any of my questions as an affront to your sensibilities. Thanks for your reply,
Rusty

If it wasn't for the "you can't upgrade from XP" thing I'd guess it would be like Vista. You had to have XP (or Vista) installed prior to installing in order to activate an update vista key.
There was a hack where you could do a clean install of Vista without using a key and then doing a Vista upgrade on top of Vista. This way you could activate and you didn't have to install XP first. Not really sure now though.

It will be interesting to find out. Since I have an older genuine XP disk but it would only reconize drives up to I think 300gb? And was doing a clean install on a new 500gb drive. Yet I also had a genuine win XP sp 2 or 3 upgrade disk, but could only use it if I installed windows 98 first. Was a real pain.

I would just install a bare-bones copy of Win 2k, XP, or whatever you have to the HDD, and make an image of that before installing 7 over it. That way the next time you need to reinstall Win 7, or if you want to install Win 7 on a new machine, all you'll have to do is restore the image to the HDD in question first before starting the Win 7 install process.

It should be both faster and easier then installing an older OS on the HDD the "normal way", and you'll be able to install Win 7 properly.

TheSmJ said:

I would just install a bare-bones copy of Win 2k, XP, or whatever you have to the HDD, and make an image of that before installing 7 over it. That way the next time you need to reinstall Win 7, or if you want to install Win 7 on a new machine, all you'll have to do is restore the image to the HDD in question first before starting the Win 7 install process.

It should be both faster and easier then installing an older OS on the HDD the "normal way", and you'll be able to install Win 7 properly.

That sounds like a good idea. I have an old copy of XP Home, which I have no license for, but I guess that doesn't matter... hope so anyway. I'll just wait for the October release of 7 because I figure there might be some minor changes in it between now and then. I do all of my business on this machine so I want it as trouble free as possible.

Learning Vista has been both entertaining and aggravating. I've done all the registry hacks I know of to get access to all of my files without having to always manually set security permissions, but it still tries to shut me out now and then. I hope 7 is more cooperative that way. I had to finally use Ubuntu to get all of my files copied over to my new Vista system. When I first started I was pissed at my own machine acting like I was some kind of pirate.

Thanks for the tips everybody. I'll probably be showing up here more when I do the upgrade.

Rusty