This answer is proving a hell of a lot harder to find than it should be.
I’ve got 3 PCs in my home. The thing is, they’re either running XP or Win7 RC (7100 or 7600, depending).
So…I see a nifty 3-pack of Win7 upgrades in various places - Microsoft Windows 7 Family Pack/ Home Premium Upgrade - Retail 3 PCs - Newegg.com
Great. Big savings. Totally worth it.
But I can’t find anything telling me what I need to have, OS-wise, to do the upgrade.
XP? Vista? What? Anyone know?
-Joe
Man, Vista only? That sucks.
-Joe
Isn’t there a way to do a custom install from scratch even with upgrade CDs? MS seems to suggest you can do so with the $30 student editions. Do you just need a Vista key first or something?
I have the student edition of Windows 7 that I got for $20 and the restriction is it was an upgrade only… Meaning you had to have a pre-existing copy of Vista already on your machine. You could either do an upgrade or a clean install, but if you did a clean install you had to have Vista already installed and you had to let 7 format/re-partition your HD (you couldn’t install 7 on a clean hard drive).
Also, you cannot do an in-place upgrade from 32bit Vista to 64 bit Windows 7.
Wow, what a buzzkill. I have a couple retail versions around, but I’ve happily traced my current XP install back through a series of upgrades to Win 3.1, and I’m pretty sure that was an upgrade from DOS 6. So ends a lineage.
If you had Vista installed on a USB drive, I wonder if that would suffice, given that there’s a clean install option.
Wow.
I never upgrade. Clean install all the time. It’s an opportunity to organize my data files and start nice and fresh. Also, previous “upgrade” versions just asked for a CD, not a full hard-drive install. Things must have changed. I wonder though if you can trick it by installing Vista without activating it, and then upgrading.
But wow. 3.1 to XP? How’d you handle all the motherboard changes? What kind of strange programs have you got installed?
Ah so you do need it installed. I try to shy away from upgrades because they leave old crap behind, but maybe I’ll pick up the student one.
As far as XP, according to the win741.com website:
Looks like you can install over XP?
Even if it did, there is still a problem. The comments in this thread indicate that the Windows 7 upgrade installer wipes all trace of Vista off your machine if you attempt that install option. The question would be whether you can circumvent this. I could see someone removing the USB drive after the verification, but before Windows could wipe it. But that could be quite risky.
I’d think drive cloning would be a better solution, as one is legally allowed to have a backup of their hard drive. One would clone the USB drive to the internal hard drive before the upgrade. The problem there would be that the activation for one of the drives may no longer be legitimate.
And, obviously, I’m not encouraging this, especially if it turns out that any of this breaks the law. If one were inclined to break the law, it would make little sense, as someone unhampered by the legalities would presumedly have other methods of getting Windows 7.
According to zdnet you can do the upgrade license. It will ask for your key:
From a licensing point of view, your installed copy of Windows is irrelevant. What matters is the sticker on the side of the PC. If you have a Certificate of Authenticity for Windows XP or Windows Vista on that computer (or a certificate of authenticity from a retail copy of Windows that has been assigned to that machine), you qualify for an upgrade license to any edition of Windows 7.
Yip, and they are cleverly not telling you this straight out. It would be far simpler to list what would work, but that would be a marketing disaster. Vista has endured a very negative public image and has only recently been considered okay.
I also want to point out that this is, if I’m not mistaken, the first time Microsoft has required the upgrade user to have had the most recent previous version of Windows. With Vista’s lack of popularity, it is surely the first time it has really mattered to the average user.
I think we need to go back to what Horselover (if that’s his real name) was saying. You can’t in-place upgrade XP because the OS is just too different, but you can buy the Upgrade version of 7 and save money.
For the student editions of Vista, at least, there was a workaround where you installed it without an activation key, requiring you to activate it within 30 days. Then, before those 30 days elapsed, you did the upgrade install, upgrading your unactivated Vista to activated Vista. Did they fix this for 7?
Instructions on how to turn your upgrade install into a full install without having to install twice:
Here’s CNet’s guide to upgrade from XP to Windows 7:
Instructions from Microsoft for going from Windows XP to Windows 7 are here.