Upgrading from XP to Windows 7

The transition from XP to Windows 7 is not going to be smooth - certainly as smooth as from Vista to W7 - if the plethora of online articles is to be believed. I run XP, but don't plan to upgrade until next year at the earliest, probably after the inevitable Service Pack 1 for W7 comes out, and in conjunction with a hardware upgrade, which I'll be due for anyway by then. Hopefully, by then some of the kinks will have been ironed out. Most articles seem to suggest that a clean install is going to work best - that means you effectively wipe your hard drive and start again from scratch. Of course, it also means it's essential to back up all your data. (And let's hope you have the original disks or installation files for all the programs you use!)
If you want to do it sooner, here are a few articles to help you:
First up, an article with lots of screenshots.
Here are five things PC World thinks you should be aware of.
Computerworld has a series of helpful questions and answers.
Assuming the upgrade goes well, PC World explains how the new W7 interface works differently from XP.

What will Windows 7 deliver?

This week ushers in the new golden age for Microsoft, or no doubt that's what the company would like to have us believe. Behind us will be all the bad news that accompanied the Vista operating system, and we can now sail into the sunset with Windows 7, which is perfect in every way. But if you are wondering what Windows 7 is all about, and will it really make a difference, one of the best articles explaining the difference between it and Vista is this one by Rob Pegorora of The Washington Post.

The downside of Windows 7

Just when I think maybe life might get a bit simpler, along comes someone to spoil my day.
Further to my post on Windows 7 last week, Galen Gruman now tells me that if I want to upgrade from the XP operating system, I will have to do a complete reinstall of everything.

Unlike Vista users, (XP users) can't do an "in-place upgrade," in which the new OS overwrites the old one, preserving their installed applications, preferences, and data. Instead, they'll have to do a clean install, which means they have to back up their data, install Win 7 (either deleting or XP or installing as a separate environment), reinstall their apps, restore their data, and re-create their preferences.
For Windows XP users who avoided Vista because of its many problems, that upgrade work may seem as adding insult to injury, making it harder for them to finally adopt a new version of Windows. Through its PR agency, Microsoft confirms to InfoWorld that there will be no "in-place upgrade" option for XP users, but it declines to explain why not. "More materials on your question are in the works," the spokesman says.
But there may be good reason not to support an in-place upgrade, suggests Michael Silver, a Gartner analyst who follows Microsoft technologies. That's because viruses, registry errors, and other performance-sapping flaws in the user's Windows environment would be carried over into Windows 7; something that would not happen with a clean install.

Windows 7

When Microsoft released its new operating system Vista, it met a storm of resistance, which generally boiled down to two big problems - it required a very fast computer and scads of memory to run all the features, which for a lot of people would have meant a serious upgrade of their computer; and there were a lot of incompatibilities with existing hardware, eg printers, modems, sound and video cards, etc. While most of the incompatibilities have since been sorted out, the memory problem is still a major one. Hence, a high proportion of XP users are clinging desperately to their operating system. So much so, that Microsoft was forced to extend the length of time it would support XP. Vista still has not attracted the user base that Microsoft was expecting, and the ongoing problems forced it to hasten development of a replacement operating system, dubbed Windows 7. Development of this is well advanced, and several million people downloaded a free trial (called a "beta"), which has generally attracted good reviews. As Pat Pilcher wrote in the NZ Herald:

Having used Windows 7 Beta for the better part of two weeks, I'm pleased to report it takes Vista's strengths and manages to fix most of its annoyances. I'd even go as far as saying that Windows 7 is perhaps one of the most complete and bomb-proof betas I've ever used.

It looks like a lot of people will leapfrog Vista, and hang on to XP until they can upgrade to Windows 7 when it is finally released (and I will almost certainly be one of them, unless I have already ditched Microsoft completely and switched to Linux, which I am more tempted to do by the day).