Most Windows 7 upgrades will be destructive

Posted on 10th August, 2009 by

Deciphering Windows 7 Upgrades: The Official Chart | Walt Mossberg | Mossblog | AllThingsDigital

Linked via OSNews, Walt Mossberg explains that upgrading to Windows 7 from Windows XP will mean wiping your hard drive clean, and that if you don’t use one or two specific versions of Vista which correspond to your version of Windows 7, you will also have to wipe your hard drive. This may mean that if you are using Home Premium and you install W7 Home Premium or Ultimate, you will still be able to upgrade, but not if you choose the Professional version. This is bizarre, as no other operating system has ever required a clean-slate upgrade. When upgrading Linux or changing from one brand to another, if you have a system and a data partition, you can just wipe the system partition and keep your data.

The prices of the new OS are a shock as well. The pre-order price of W7 in the UK is around £125, with Professional being £30 more. Among the features of W7 Professional is “Run many existing Windows XP productivity applications in Windows XP Mode”; so this means that Windows 7 will otherwise break backwards compatibility with XP? As for Ultimate, it offers BitLocker encryption and the ability to switch languages — something the standard version of Mac OS X offers anyway, and which might be necessary in a multi-lingual home environment where, say, the husband works in English and the wife in Urdu. We should not have to pay premium prices for something that is free in the competition. Besides, Vista is such a piece of garbage that Windows 7 should be a free upgrade for anyone with a genuine version of it.

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  • http://folio.me.uk Tim

    I have never found OS upgrades very effective and prefer to do a clean install, whether Windows or Linux. Users on Ubuntu forums used to encourage clean installs with each new release, rather than upgrades, and I soon found out why. With each upgrade on a laptop, performance got worse and worse, until I could barely do anything at all.

    If you were quick, you could have pre-ordered W7 for about £50. I wasn’t however, so I probably won’t bother with an upgrade. The full price is too much.

    What’s the language issue? Do you mean all the menus change language? Or just input? The input issue has been possible since XP.

  • http://www.blogistan.co.uk/blog/ Indigo Jo

    Tim: you can do a more-or-less clean install on Linux without wiping your data, but you need to have partitioned your drive so that the /home directory is on its own partition. That way, you only need to reformat your system, i.e. root, partition. I rarely use the APT upgrade route as it does result in degraded performance.

    I wasn’t quick and I can’t remember why; perhaps I just didn’t have the money at the time (work has been really slow this year b/c of the recession). However, as I recall American prices were the same figures in dollars - another example of the trans-Atlantic rip-off. It’s still too much for an upgrade to an OS as unreliable and broken as Vista, which is MS’s fault.

  • Random Guy

    Vista is not that bad. True, it was released in an almost beta state, but 2 years down the line it is more stable, flashier and (with a Quad-core and 4 GB of RAM) snappier as a 64-bit OS than XP could ever dream to be (in my opinion of course)….:P

  • Another Random Guy

    As Tim says always do a clean install of a new OS, be it Windows, Linux or Mac.

    In the case of a Windows 7 install, if you follow good practice and keep your data in a central directory and backed up and all the software you have purchased on a bookshelf it should take no longer than a few hours to upgrade. If you use the opportunity to add a new and bigger hard drive and making use of the windows transfer wizard you could have the whole job done in a Saturday afternoon (and to prove it that’s exactly what I did last weekend !!!)

    Indigo Jo : Don’t know why you are making such a fuss about the price - have you looked at the price of other commercial software - for example Photoshop CS4 is £178.25 upgrade or £615.25 full price. Most users will not pay nearly that much as most will get it OEM with a new PC’s.

    Up until last weekend I have been using Vista at home since release with less problems than XP - suspect the problems you are having are “user errors”

    Just because something “is free in the competition” does not mean it should be free for everyone - what a totally ridicules statement - imagine if you walked into a Ford dealership and said, I want that Focus, but because the Astra has free air-con I want free Air-Con on the Focus.

    Another Random Guy

  • mirele

    Thanks for an informative article. I was rather hoping that MSFT had learned its lesson with the disaster that is Vista, but I see that isn’t the case. All my current boxes are on various flavors of XP (looks around at work and home boxes) and if push comes to shove, I’ll migrate over to Ubuntu or some similar NIX for the home boxes. I’m not going to buy something because it’s *pretty. That’s why I upgraded from D0S 6.0 to Windows 3.1—I thought the mahjongg game was pretty.

  • http://folio.me.uk Tim

    Win7 betas have had good reviews and you can have it free for a year if you really want it, but I don’t think I could justify an upgrade when Vista is perfectly stable on my desktop PC.

    I have experimented with the free Operating Systems in the past, but have always had good reason to return to Windows. The main attraction of alternatives is cost - i.e. being free - but I find there are drawbacks using them on a family PC.

    PuppyLinux runs on an old laptop because it seemed the only way to get any speed, but it would never do what my desktop can do, e.g. video messaging with folk in Turkey, running e-learning, etc.

    So upgrades must pass us by. Vista was not half the pile of poo that WindowsME was - the only time I ever felt I needed to upgrade an existing PC.

  • http://www.drmaxtor.blogspot.com DrM

    I’ve been messing around with Windows 7 RTM and its definitely no Vista, not sure if its as good as XP but I think it’ll do well. I prefer fresh installs myself. Ubuntu 9 is still king as far as I’m concerned.

  • Random Guy

    Article with benchmarks here:

    http://www.maximumpc.com/article/reviews/windows7review?page=0%2C3

    They talk it up, but performance improvement is not huge compared to Vista 64-bit imo.

  • faysal

    I have dual boot with linux and windows XP. I was starting up arabic classes when I realised I didn’t have the right-left languages installed and not having the cd anymore and did not want to pirate, I simply switch ubuntu which had it for free. I then moved to debian (squeeze) with kde 4.2. It has been several months now and never had to go back to windows for anything yet. I don’t know what bill gates is thinking this crap will make people consider other options. Many of my friends are buying the new mac books these days, much better investment for one’s money.