Advice Sought On Most Reliable XP to Win7 Approach

While most folks are probably focused on Win10 these days, I have been asked by small (and financially distressed) charity to upgrade (in place) a number of 3.2 gHz, 32 bit, Dell Precision 650 workstations received as donations from XP-Pro to Win7-Pro. I have half a dozen 32 bit Win7-Pro Upgrade licenses to work with to accomplish this task. I have read through most of the Win7 Upgrade tutorials available on this site several times including the 'upgrade', 'upgrade' with clean install, custom, and Kari's 'upgrade install from XP to Windows 7' (this last approach describing using an intermediate step using Vista) tutorials. All of the Dell 650 PCs are equipped with either one or two 300 gB server-quality U320 SCSI hard drives and have either three or four gB of RAM installed. All of the machines have had their hard drives heavily partitioned and it appears that all of the XP-Pro operating system files are contained in the c:\ partition of each machine and each c:\partition holds no other data beyond that data XP requires be located in the same partition as the operating system (i.e., virtually all of each PC's application and data files are in partitions other than the c:\partition). I have the original program discs for all of the installed applications on these machines

I am rather long in the tooth as my PC experience goes back to the IBM PC-2 and MS-DOS. However, I do not know a lot about Windows after Win 98 (i.e., NT and subsequent versions) and my experience with getting Win 7 Home going on two of my own Dell Optiplex 755 machines has not been error-free and has been somewhat frustrating.

My question is this: what is the best approach for moving these Dell Precision 650 machines to Win7-Pro? Because each of these 650 machines has different software loaded from the others, it appears to me that some 'in place' kind of upgrade - something I know that can not be done directly - would make this task considerably easier. On the other hand, Kari's approach using Vista as an intermediate step sounds like it would save a lot of time. Kari, though, has posted a warning memo about his approach and the language in that memo gives me pause. I would like to hear from anyone who has tried Kari's approach and be advised it is at all feasible for someone with only a moderate level of Win7 knowledge.

If Kari's approach isn't feasible and as I have the original program discs for all of the presently installed application software, would it be better to 'bite the bullet' and plan to reinstall all of the existing applications? Again, advice on the way to proceed from anyone who has had practice at moving XP machines to Win7 is welcomed. My goal is to achieve the most reliable and error-free conversion.

One further issue: because these Precision 650 machines all use U320 SCSI as the hard drive interface (rather than the more common IDE, EIDE, and later variants of this drive interface approach), I anticipate that there will be an initial glitch getting the SCSI drives recognized. I have no idea whether the existing drive partitioning will make the XP to Win7 move easier or more difficult.

Thanks, in advance, for any and all suggestions and advice on the approach I should take.

Use Ghost Solution Suite 2.5.1 (Ghost 11.5 the enterprise version) or similar software to image these machines. You'll build one machines, get it the way you want, then lay down an that image to the others.

PCunite -- Thanks for the suggestion. As I have read up on Ghost, it sounds to me like it won't facilitate in-line update of XP to Win7 as I am trying to do. In the situation I am dealing with, there are only four PCs involved, they are not networked together, run mostly different applications, and only one can be taken down at a time. Accordingly the idea of creating a common image file to be used on all four machines doesn't seem useful to me. Moreover, as the machines are not networked, I don't understand how one can make Ghost work. Is there something I am not understanding from the Ghost instructions?

Ranger4 -- Thank you for the reference. I did not know that the one you pointed me to even existed. While it doesn't exactly solve my problem, it improves my understanding of what can go on.