Can I upgrade from Windows XP straight to Windows 7? Yes. and no, you don’t have make Vista a middleman.
So your business may be facing a major problem. With no easy way to transfer your existing programs from Windows XP to Windows 7, your company’s administrators need to do what Microsoft calls a “custom” install. “Custom” is what most administrators call a clean install; you end up deleting everything on the PC.That can be a real headache.Microsoft offer following tools to migrate systems.
I step
Run the “Windows 7 Upgrade Advisor,” which as of July, was in beta. Start here, download and install the advisor, then run it.
II stepMake a disk image of your XP machine as it exists now so that, if you later decide Windows 7 isn’t worth the disc it’s written to and you want to revert to the ancient XP, you can do so without a lot of hassle.
III. Choose Migration ToolMicrosoft does provide a tool, Windows Easy Transfer, suitable for small offices and home offices (SOHO) and small-to-medium businesses (SMBs). It can help migrate files, e-mail, pictures, and settings from Windows XP to Windows 7. If your users store a lot of files on your PC instead of file servers, this can be very handy.
Larger businesses with multiple identically-configured PCs will want to use Microsoft’s User State Migration Tool 4.0 (USMT) to automate the transfer of such files. Unlike Windows Easy Transfer, USMT supports “hard-link migration.” With this utility program, user accounts, files, and settings are saved on the hard drive of the PC being upgraded.
However, both USMT and Windows Easy Transfer still leave you with the far more cumbersome nuisance of transferring programs. One program that can help you with that is LapLink’s PCmover.
IV. Final Check
After migrating to Windows 7, install and try out the software you’ve been running on XP. It might work fine. (Most likely to have fewest problems: Products from Microsoft and other major vendors.)
If the program won’t run, you can try to run it in “compatibility mode.” Right-click on the program’s shortcut, select “Properties,” then click the “Compatibility” tab. Next, check the “Run this program in compatibility mode” box, and in the drop-down list, choose the version of Windows, in this case Windows XP.
Or you can run free virtualization software on Windows 7, such as Sun’s VirtualBox, with a copy of Windows XP as the “guest” OS within the virtual environment. You’ll need an XP license to install inside the virtual machine
So your business may be facing a major problem. With no easy way to transfer your existing programs from Windows XP to Windows 7, your company’s administrators need to do what Microsoft calls a “custom” install. “Custom” is what most administrators call a clean install; you end up deleting everything on the PC.That can be a real headache.Microsoft offer following tools to migrate systems.
I step
Run the “Windows 7 Upgrade Advisor,” which as of July, was in beta. Start here, download and install the advisor, then run it.
II stepMake a disk image of your XP machine as it exists now so that, if you later decide Windows 7 isn’t worth the disc it’s written to and you want to revert to the ancient XP, you can do so without a lot of hassle.
III. Choose Migration ToolMicrosoft does provide a tool, Windows Easy Transfer, suitable for small offices and home offices (SOHO) and small-to-medium businesses (SMBs). It can help migrate files, e-mail, pictures, and settings from Windows XP to Windows 7. If your users store a lot of files on your PC instead of file servers, this can be very handy.
Larger businesses with multiple identically-configured PCs will want to use Microsoft’s User State Migration Tool 4.0 (USMT) to automate the transfer of such files. Unlike Windows Easy Transfer, USMT supports “hard-link migration.” With this utility program, user accounts, files, and settings are saved on the hard drive of the PC being upgraded.
However, both USMT and Windows Easy Transfer still leave you with the far more cumbersome nuisance of transferring programs. One program that can help you with that is LapLink’s PCmover.
IV. Final Check
After migrating to Windows 7, install and try out the software you’ve been running on XP. It might work fine. (Most likely to have fewest problems: Products from Microsoft and other major vendors.)
If the program won’t run, you can try to run it in “compatibility mode.” Right-click on the program’s shortcut, select “Properties,” then click the “Compatibility” tab. Next, check the “Run this program in compatibility mode” box, and in the drop-down list, choose the version of Windows, in this case Windows XP.
Or you can run free virtualization software on Windows 7, such as Sun’s VirtualBox, with a copy of Windows XP as the “guest” OS within the virtual environment. You’ll need an XP license to install inside the virtual machine