Upgrade Vista to Win7

I've been a long time supporter when moving from one OS to another that I perform a clean installation. This really came about when the upgrade from Win2K to Vista failed miserably.

My question is, who has performed the 'upgrade' on WinVista to convert to Win7 and how did it work for you?

I could perform a clean install, but this is the first time I'm reluctant to. With the number of software titles to install it's going to take me at least 3 evenings to get it up and running.
The other issue is that I have an iPhone, and if I wipe and reload I'm not sure what issues I'm going to run into there with my downloaded apps, and more importantly if it's going to re-register my phone thus taking away one of my 5 'connect to computer' and then because of that requiring to wipe my phone and start fresh.

Thoughts and ideas?

Morph:

On my computer I had two physical drives, and I chose to do a custom (clean install) on my second drive leaving Vista 64 bit on my first drive. The installation could not have gone more smoothly.

I didn't have a second drive in my Wife's computer, so my strategy from the start was an upgrade. I had read all the horror stories about the continuous re-booting on Windows 7 upgrades, but that seemed to be related to only those who were
downloading Windows 7, and those trying to upgrade from Vista 32 bit to Windows 64 bit. I had purchased a boxed copy of Window 7 Home Premium, and I was upgrading from 64 bit to 64 bit.

The upgrade got to the point of its first reboot, and then started continually rebooting. The installation indicated that the upgrade was NOT successful, and that the old O/S would be reloaded. The old O/S was never reloaded. After about 4 reboots I called Microsoft technical Support.

The Microsoft support technician had me try: Safe mode, then Last known Good configuration, and then System Repair, none of which remedied the problem.

I knew this meant Vista was no longer available to do an upgrade. The next step was to try the installation of Windows 7 again, but this time around, since Vista was no longer accessible, the choice was to do a "Custom Install", in other words a clean install.

The Custom Install failed at the same place the upgrade had, and the computer was back to the continuous reboots. The last trouble-shooting step I took was to run chkdsk with the repair option on the c: drive. Chkdsk didn't report any problem, and the technician and I agreed to try the install one more time before bringing in the big guns from the “Microsoft Research Team”.

Well the second time around worked, and we aren’t sure why, because the only thing we did was run chkdsk, which did not report any bad files or sectors. Once Windows 7 successfully installed, the technician provided me with a few steps for reducing the probability of an upgrade failure:

These steps are:
1. Turn of any security software, and prevent it from starting up on a reboot.
2. Get into msconfig and turn of ALL non-Microsoft services, and disable All non-Microsoft applications from starting up.
3. Disconnect all peripherals from the computer (ex. printers, scanners, external disk drives, etc.)
4. Remove any non-essential Vendor software from the system. Microsoft has found that some of the apps from vendors that are
pre-installed on new systems can conflict with the upgrade.
5. Reboot and do the upgrade

So my advice is to do a clean install.

AJ

Nice to hear MS tech support will still stick it out with you on these things.

I have found MS tech support in the past to be worth more than the price I paid for a retail copy.

If you are pleasant and show an eagerness and capacity to learn, they will get you to your solution.

I only wonder if they still have the time (certainly they have the money) to spend entire overnights helping to troubleshoot, as they did with me over several years for a retail copy of XP, teaching me clean reinstalls, virus hunting, optimization, debugging, etc. - a complete education for $99.

Ok, I understand not the place to ask this type of question (as I will be googling), but if anyone has found a way to help transfer the iTunes/iPhone account from one to computer to another cleanly... please help. That would be great. Right now my iTunes\iPhone are the only worry in the clean install I worry about.

I'm a IT Pro, but this one program has me worried I'm going to lose a bunch of stuff in the transfer or that it's going to make me reset my entire phone. Or maybe I just perform a backup and I'm good to go. Either way, the rest of my software is something I can handle. Just wondering if anyone out there has already into a program that will help "pick up", "move", and "replace" your entire iTunes without issue or am I going to have to bite the bullet and redo it all?

I would:

ask MS or your Iphone carrier tech support that specific question,

or create a new help topic here that asks the specific question in it's title, as the topic title now is too generic.