Windows 7 Upgrade Paths Explained!

[ctal]

Someone at Microsoft is secretly working for Apple.

That’s the only possible explanation I can come up with for why they sent this “Official Windows 7 Upgrade chart” to Walt Mossberg of the Wall Street Journal, who published it in full with surprisingly little commentary....

It took me about an hour to redo this horrible chart into something that is both accurate and useful. It faithfully includes every option listed in the Microsoft chart, with the errors corrected.

Microsoft blunders with a confusing Windows 7 upgrade chart | Ed Bott’s Microsoft Report | ZDNet.com

[Brian]

I've seen a lot of criticism of the Microsoft-released graphic pretty much everywhere I've gone online today and, honestly, it really isn't that difficult to figure it out if you just take a moment, focus your mind and look at it.

Yes, it is a bit "busy" at first glance but that's nothing a few seconds of concentration can't cure.

[rjs735]

It's not the confusion that bothers me. No confusion really but if MS expects to sell WIN7 in the corporate world and expect them to spend time and resources to do custome installs on everyone of their systems. Theye are in for a surprise.

The only other alternative is if the Corp world were to replace their "aging" systems with newer pre install win7 software. In these financial times I don't think so.

Some one at MS better get their heads screwed on right and re think this upgrsde process. They are (MS) true to form following the "std" upgrade which is upgrade in place for previous version (Vista) and custom install for the one before that (XP).

They forgot that Vista was not a very succesful implementation and therefore should enable XP user to do a in place upgrde.

[k0NG0]

At work we had a Win2k to Vista upgrade, and it was as much "in-place" as would be possible with two such different products. I doubt Win2k-to-Vista would've been advertised by Microsoft as being in-place.

That is to say, you can do all sorts of things if you've got clever people engineering the upgrade. It may not be Microsoft's standard system that kicks in when you pop in the Win7 disc, but it's probably not extremely difficult either.

[ctal]

Not sure I follow the last two posts. As I understand it, in most corporate environments of significant size the IT people just have to create one installation for each unique software configuration, and then install it on every computer for which that configuration is intended, typically during an overnight period, remotely and automatically from some central server. Microsoft provides tools that facilitate this, and purchasing a volume license gets around the licensing constraints that would prevent a home or (very) small business user from doing something like this via disk imaging.

Regards,
-- Al

[DBoone]

The very large company I work for just implements on new platforms. No upgrades of existing machines. That keeps it fairly simple except for the IT folks who have to support multiple OSes and integrate them all on the same network.

[k0NG0]

Originally Posted by ctal

Not sure I follow the last two posts. As I understand it, in most corporate environments of significant size the IT people just have to create one installation for each unique software configuration, and then install it on every computer for which that configuration is intended, typically during an overnight period, remotely and automatically from some central server. Microsoft provides tools that facilitate this, and purchasing a volume license gets around the licensing constraints that would prevent a home or (very) small business user from doing something like this via disk imaging.

Regards,
-- Al

At our site we're about 1400 people or so (tens of thousands globally) and everyone has their own laptop (though "lugtop" is more like it). We used Win2k up until last fall when Vista was rolled out. The upgrade basically consisted of everyone getting an upgrade CD, starting the upgrade and then going home. When we got back next morning, we had a Vista install with all our "My Documents" and whatnot moved over to Vista.

That's what I consider in-place anyway (seeing as how there aren't many "settings" common between old hat Win2k and shiny Vista) and I bet Win2k-to-Vista wasn't something Microsoft supported. By this I simply mean that it will be possible to do the same from XP to Win7 if necessary.

I would agree with you that most (sane) corporate environments wouldn't require in-place upgrades at all (technically, ours probably wasn't) and that people would simply be told to back up anything they cared about not stored on company servers and then a new OS being rolled out transparently.

[johnrr6]

Crud----what bothers me is that I will have to do a "Custom Install" on my high end Vista Ultimate machines if I want to install Win7 Business upgrade which is actually a "downgrade"....

Am I reading this right??

I bought 3 Windows7 Professional upgrades for $300 from amazon----now I'm not sure I can even use them to upgrade those Vista Ultimate machines....