Moving from Windows XP to Windows 7

After I furnished copy for SPAUG Newsletter, and it was posted on the General Meeting page, I got several comments from members that they wanted to know about how to move from Windows XP to Windows 7, and save all of their favorite things that they had gotten used to in Windows XP.

So I tried out several schemes for upgrading-in-place (U-I-P), from XP to Vista, then from Vista to Win 7, hoping that I could move settings and such automatically.

I pulled out many of the few hairs left on my head trying to do this multi-upgrade-in-place, on two different machines, both with a clean installation of XP to a new 500 GB hard drive with four blank NTFS partitions: 5 GB boot, 100GB Xp, 100 GB Vista, 100 GB Win 7.

I tried several partitioning products, and other ones to clone a new larger hard drive with same-size or proportional partitions. I then installed XP into the 2nd partition,and it wrote the necessary boot.ini files in the 1st partition, and it booted quickly.I then installed several programs to make the U-I-P of Vista a meaningful task.Then I copied the 2nd partition to the third partition, so I could have a dual-boot of XP or XP. That worked OK.I dutifully made my True Images at each step, and checked that everything worked, on a 2 year-old ASUS AMD ATI motherboard with a dual-core Athlon 64.

Then I pulled out a never-used Windows Vista Ultimate DVD (I had hoped to dual-boot XP Pro and Vista Home Premium U-I-P, but MS said that I could only U-I-P from XP Pro to V Business or V Ultimate.) and proceeded to make an U-I-P.

After about 30 minutes of puffing and wheezing, Vista told me that it could not continue, and returned my 3rd partition to XP. So much for my hope to have a triple-boot machine, to compre the speed and operation of XP againt Vista against Win 7. I then cloned the hard drive into a second motherboard, with an Intel chipset and X4 processor, installed the correct drivers, and tried again.

"No Joy", as the pilot said when his engine stopped revolving.

So I dropped back to plan C, which was to make a triple-boot machine with clean installs of XP, Vist Ult & Win 7 Ult. It works, but the process of transferring files and settings using Windows Easy Transfer was all WET.