The good, bad and ugly of upgrading

I guess I just want to rant and rave a bit. After running Win7 beta for sixth months I was very happy with it on my old desktop, although I could never get my new laptop to load the beta version. So when Win 7 came out I decided to do a few things, one is I built (or had built) a new desktop, with a 1gb graphics card and 4gb ram and a new full win 7 operating system. Of course runs great and is wonderful, thats the GOOD. Next I decided to upgrade my two home laptops with the family pack upgrade, one running XP, the other Vista. Well the HP running XP upgraded almost fine, still have a driver issue with the touchpad, but i normally use a wireless mouse so not a big issue. I will continue to search out drivers as I can. It is not an old laptop and drivers should be easier to locate. Thats the BAD Then came the computer running Vista, not even a year old, would not load the upgrade. I tried everything, finally I took the laptop in to the shop that built my desktop unit. It seems Acer had somehow installed XP under Vista and created a hidden partition that would not allow the program to install, so we completely cleaned the harddrive and did a fresh install. This eventually did install, but it still wasnt easy. So after it installed, time to register, this is where the ugly begins, since it was an upgrade disc the registration failed because it was a clean install and after 20 minutes of trying to get through the phone maze and then being cut off and starting over again only to be told that sorry you cannot do this, "you call acer", "go back to retail store", yada yada, in some foreign dialect. This got so frustrating, I knew all they needed to do was renew a product key code, it took 2 hours befofe I found a tech that understood this and took care of it. So bottom line, I like the product, I am unhappy in the upgrade system and very dissapointed with the overall customer service from Microsoft. Because of which the 12 computers in my office will continue to operate with XP, (except mine).

Yeah, Microsoft really made this difficult in many instances. That's the sad part about anti-piracy measures...the hackers work around it easily while honest to goodness customers get the shaft.

For future reference, Paul Thurrott of the Windows Supersite had a nice article about the upgrade process or the clean install method with an upgrade only key.
http://www.winsupersite.com/win7/clean_install_upgrade_media.asp

Good article, but...
"Microsoft's preference is that you simply call Microsoft Support instead. The call is free, and they will get you up and running (i.e. activated) very quickly."
lol, 2 hours on the phone is not very quickly, I think Paul may have a better phone number than they give the rest of us.

To the OP, Im sorry that you had to go through all of this just to enjoy Windows 7, but it seems to me that Acer, was really the problem. If I am wrong, don't fret, MS will pay the ulitmate price, since consumers vote with their wallets. MS is a public company, if there are enough votes against them, things will soon chanage.

You should always clean install a new OS, with reformatting. XP should now die permanently. You would have had to clean install xp anyway - upgrades are not supported, and for good reason.

I agree that a clean install is usualy best, but if you are going to sell an upgrade version then it should work, or allow a full install (which it does, sorta) They really should just sell one version to consumers.
As far as blaming ACER, that is one thing that I hate, the software ppl say call hardware manufacturere, hardware says call software. In essense they are business partners, and should work things out together. You can always pass the buck, the real winning companies stand up and fix whatever the problem is.