Hardware and OS upgrade

[society misfit]

Time to upgrade to Win 7 however I have a bit of a dilemma! Along with wanting to upgrading the OS from XP Home to Win 7 Home Premium 64, I also want to perform a hardware upgrade as well which will include new Motherboard, CPU, RAM and Hard Disc. My question is do I upgrade the hardware first then re-activate XP? This will most likely require a Win XP Repair install to get the computer working, or at the very most re installing XP all together. Or do I perform the OS upgrade first then upgrade the hardware.

Just to note that only have 1Gb of RAM installed with my current XP hardware configuration which does not meet the min requirements for Win 7 64bit

Does XP have to be activated to upgrade to Win 7 or just present on the system?

One more question...if I format Win 7 down the road (use to do this about once a year to clean out the bugs in XP) do I have to install XP again to install Win 7 upgrade?

Thanks

 

[Bill2]

1) Fact is you can do a clean install of win7 using an upgrade disk even on a blank drive with no OS, but this is legal only if you have a previous qualifying version of windows. In your case you have an activated XP now so that should not be a problem.

http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/31402-clean-install-upgrade-windows-7-version.html?filter

2) Upgrade your hardware first, then clean install as per the tutorial above. If you want to format and reinstall win7 later, you can use the same process or just image the install while it is fresh and clean, then restore from the image .

http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/73828-imaging-free-macrium.html

 

[LiquidSnak]

Are you using an upgrade disc? If you are using a fresh installation (OEM or Retail) then you do not need to reinstall windows XP, but just run the install from boot.

Or you can do this:

http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/31402-clean-install-upgrade-windows-7-version.html?filter

Edit: Bill beat me to it.