Microsoft to ease Windows 7 upgrades to netbooks......

[Night Hawk]

October 22nd, 2009

Microsoft to ease Windows 7 upgrades to netbooks with USB key solution

Posted by Mary Jo Foley @ 10:19 am

Remember the rumors earlier this year that Microsoft was going to deliver Windows 7 on a thumb drive? Well, the rumors were correct — sort of…
On October 22, Microsoft announced it will enable netbook users who want to upgrade from XP (or Vista) to Windows 7 to use a special version of Windows 7 preloaded on a USB stick.
(I have no idea whether this has any connection to the rumored “StartKey” project I wrote about back in 2008. StartKey, the way it was originally portrayed to me, was more of an initiative to put Windows and Windows Live settings on a USB stick.)
Microsoft officials confirmed to News.com that it will make available an online tool, starting on October 22, “that will walk users through the process of moving a downloaded copy of Windows 7 onto a USB drive, be that a memory stick or portable hard drive.”

More at: Microsoft to ease Windows 7 upgrades to netbooks with USB key solution | All about Microsoft | ZDNet.com

 

[Night Hawk]

The article doesn't point to any premade usb key but explains that MS will provide instructions for something already very familiar to people here on how to go about creating a usb key with the download of 7 for installation purposes. Instead of this being the betas or RCs those who have the finished retail version of 7 being subscribers at MSDN and TechNet have already beeing using this method.

The usb key method would be the only actual method for any upgrade or clean on a netbook since you don't have any optical drive to work with only usb input. The thing to pay the closest attention to in the article there is...

Microsoft officials confirmed to News.com that it will make available an online tool, starting on October 22, “that will walk users through the process of moving a downloaded copy of Windows 7 onto a USB drive, be that a memory stick or portable hard drive.”

 

[SnarkyTwit]

I recieved a dell netbook from Microsoft yesterday with windows 7 ultimate preloaded on it. It also included the disk. No USB key. C'est la vie.

Snarks

 

[Night Hawk]

7 of course was preinstalled and likely has a recovery parition as well as restoration option there. For a clean upgrade once a netbook is wiped of a Vista installation however MS has decided to provide their own tool probably very close in some ways to UltraISO but only enough to format and make bootable a usb flash drive for the purpose once you purchase 7 electronically at their online store.

 

[chuckr]

October 22nd, 2009

Microsoft to ease Windows 7 upgrades to netbooks with USB key solution

Posted by Mary Jo Foley @ 10:19 am

Remember the rumors earlier this year that Microsoft was going to deliver Windows 7 on a thumb drive? Well, the rumors were correct — sort of…
On October 22, Microsoft announced it will enable netbook users who want to upgrade from XP (or Vista) to Windows 7 to use a special version of Windows 7 preloaded on a USB stick.
(I have no idea whether this has any connection to the rumored “StartKey” project I wrote about back in 2008. StartKey, the way it was originally portrayed to me, was more of an initiative to put Windows and Windows Live settings on a USB stick.)
Microsoft officials confirmed to News.com that it will make available an online tool, starting on October 22, “that will walk users through the process of moving a downloaded copy of Windows 7 onto a USB drive, be that a memory stick or portable hard drive.”

Many thanks to member "Teerex", from Croatia, (and Airbot) for his post here:

http://www.sevenforums.com/news/30649-microsoft-tool-installing-windows-7-usb-drive.html

who posted this link to capture the file Windows7-USB-DVD-tool.exe from:

Microsoft Store: Download Manager Help

Thanks, Teerex, and Airbot...

This should help...

 

[DrWho]

I've been building bootable Flash Drives with various programs on them, for some time, using the USB Flash Drive format tool from HP.
USBFormat.exe - File Shared from Box.net - Free Online File Storage

I've not had any reason to try it yet, but I don't see the difference in making a Flash Drive boot to Ghost or Partition Magic or boot to the Windows Setup.
The only real diff is the size of the Program you're putting on the FD.

It's a big world and I suspect that someone has already done this and just not reporting it here.

I have an Acer Aspire ONE, Netbook, with (of course) no CD/DVD drive.
So I just connected a standard DVD Rom drive via an IDE to USB adapter and loaded Win-7 directly from the boot DVD. Going the Flash Drive route, was not necessary.

Yes, the netbook will boot from any USB device. I used Partition Magic 8 on a bootable flash drive, to repartition my netbook Hard Drive.
And Ghost 11.5 on a bootable flash drive to make a Ghost backup Image of my XP OS prior to installing Win-7.

Using bootable flash drives to run programs on Netbooks, certainly makes life a lot easier.

Cheers Mates!
The Doctor

 

[F1FAN]

is it out for download now?

 

[chuckr]

is it out for download now?

Did you try the link provided in the above message # 5 ?

 

[Night Hawk]

It is available and goes on fast! I posted some screens of how that looks and works in post #13 in the thread seen at http://www.sevenforums.com/news/30649-microsoft-tool-installing-windows-7-usb-drive-2.html

 

[djfirestorm]

Without reading this...simple, get a 4GB USB stick, and use UltraISO to "write" a copy of your DVD (from ISO) to the USB stick using USB+HDD (correct the mode if I am wrong). No need to pay a special price if they do bring a USB edition out, takes like 8 minutes to do if you have a good fast flash stick, and anyone can do it.

 

[Night Hawk]

There's no special price since the tool there is strictly free to start with. It also works for the RC when tried out there. But you have to agree the shareware version of UltraISO allows you to reformat the usb flash drive if you still have data on it or originally had reformatted it to another file system like NTFS.

In some cases here a few saw a live Linux distro installed to make up a data recovery stick or simply used to create an install key for the RCs.