Windows XP to Windows 7 upgrade?

Is the only way to accomplish this without losing all my settings to upgrade to vista than upgrade vista to Windows 7? I do not have an external HDD large enough and stupid Easy Transfer will not transfer just registry settings but requires the entire programs which will not work for me.. and I am not paying no ridiculous $89 for Zinstall that supposedly does do this. Their should be another method to upgrade from XP to Windows 7 but the only one that I see so far is a double upgrade.. XP to Vista to Win7.

If there was ever a time to clean reinstall Windows, now is it with the best OS ever. Why import corruption which has built up in XP or Vista?

If you need to store your data, send it over the network to a folder you create in another computer's C drive.

Or in Disk Management, create a partition large enough at the end of your HD to store all of your User folders, or just drag your named User folder into it: Partition or Volume - Shrink
Partition or Volume - Create New

If you have a Recovery partition on the computer make your Recovery disks so you have a path back to XP factory install, so now you can delete it to use the space for Win7. Ditto any OEM partition which will lose its links with a clean reinstall anyway, plus Win7 has better utilities than the useless factory utilities.

So now you can boot the WIn7 install DVD, select Custom, then Drive Options, carefully delete all partitions except the data partition you've made which you can identify by its size and placement on disk. In the deleted space, create new partition(s) as you wish, format each one except the data partition before installing Win7 to first partition.

Clean Install Windows 7

When you boot the Win7 install DVD it will scan the HD to see XP and allow use of the Upgrade version Product Key, even if you then go on to delete and format the XP partition, which I would do.

No not going to do a clean install.. the install is only about 3 months old now and took me a week getting all my programs back on it.. and I don't have no 2.3 TB single drive to use the horrible easy transfer to do the transfer.. easy transfer should of backed up registry files for the user and I wouldn't have to reinstall everything.. so no the only option I have is a vista upgrade to a Windows 7 Upgrade.

I don't recommend EasyTransfer. I drag and drop my files using an external backup.

Nor do I think anyone here would suggest that you do two in-place Upgrades to arrive at Win7 from XP and expect to have decent performance.

However since I've never seen it done before, and you insist, we should help you so others can learn from the experience.

You'll need to back up your files externally. I suggest simply dragging and dropping your active User folders to external or sending them over the network to another computer.

Do you have access to a Vista installer? YOu can unlock all versions using this method which is the same for Vista: Windows 7 Universal Installation Disc - Create

The only known XP to Win 7 Upgrade path is literally to do an XP to Vista in place upgrade and then a Vista to 7 upgrade.

Being a former Windows XP OS user... I know you pain, however, I would not recommend the painstaking processes of doing in place upgrades, as most in place upgrades tend to bring with it the headaches that your Old OS may have had.

I will say, as it was my Sys and App drive that failed on myself recently, my Games and Data Drives were different drives and survive the issue. Depending on most of the applications, you should not have a problem getting them up and running again. HOWEVER, even an In Place upgrade will not guarantee your programs working if you happen to have older software and they might not like the vista or Win 7 updated architecture...

Secondly... Win 7 does have a Virtual XP option... If you get, I think Professional or better, you can have a Virtual XP install in case you really need to have XP, but it might not have the settings you want to preserve unless you want to hazard a possible experiment of system backup to disk and try and restore in the virtual environment to see if that works.

To be honest, if it is 3 months old... Start from scratch. As I had to do the same, I was able to get my system up and running within a day. It took me about 3 or 4 days to be settled with what I wanted. I had to redo that again when my XP laptop went the same direction. It shouldn't take you too long to rebuild your system if it was only 3 months ago and you have you software.

Doing an upgrade from XP to Vista then to 7 is like trying to take a solid foundation and then building up with mud; you can technically do it but it's not going to be structurally sound. There are bound to be problems if you decide to go this route because Microsoft's strong suit has never been upgrades. There always manage to be some oddities when doing direct upgrades rather than clean installs. Although they may not show themselves at first, they generally manifest themselves in weird ways that you wouldn't quite expect.

Save yourself the grief now and do a clean install of Windows 7 because if you do go through these two upgrades, you will most likely have to reinstall 7 due to some nagging issue that came about sooner rather than later. If you do in the end decide to go through with it, I'm just warning you, you're most likely going to run into problems sooner rather than later. Just writing from experience.