Questions re upgrading from XP to Win7

rubble2

Hi,

As per the title, I have run the Win 7 upgrade adviser and everything checks out ok for converting to Win 7.

Reading on here, I note that I have to do a clean install and therefore need to backup all my files ready to reinstall them after the upgrade.

First question, I have an external Hard drive that I use for backups, I have the facility to clone my C drive to the external HDD, that way, if anything goes wrong with the upgrade I can just rewrite the cloned disc back to the C drive. If I use the cloned disc method would that suffice to enable me to reinstall my files after upgrading or do I need to use the Windows utility that copies the files for me specifically for this purpose? (sorry can't remember it's name off hand).

Second question, I am using Microsoft Office Enterprise 2007 on my XP machine. Once I have upgraded to Win 7, can I then re-install Office off the original CD or will it see the new operating system as a different computer and therefore not allow me to install it?

Thanks

closed

disk image backup is better than clone, macrium free can do that, and allows you to browse for individual files/folders.

ideally, if it's important you should have 2 copies in different places. ie copy the data to dvd/other drive as well, and check they are both readable before continuing

xp will still work, as will antivirus after april, the rush/marketing/paranoia to upgrade is overstated. A third of the world is still using xp. if you have a backup and get infected, restore the backup, no longer infected.

As it seems we (and many others) may end up paying for the patches to be developed anyway, perhaps they would like to pass them on for free to the rest of the world. If something really bad comes along, I can't see Microsoft saying, we got a fix for that, but the billion+ xp users can't have it :p , bad PR.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/03/20/doh_microsoft_nhs_one_year_xp_deal/

jbuchanangb

I did this last year. I didn't try anything sneaky. I bought the right disk with Windows 7 Upgrade License and the associated tools on the disk. I followed the Microsoft recommended process.

I made sure I had printed off the whole list from the upgrade advisor, and identified the original disks or downloaded files in order to re-install apps. I checked carefully for available drivers for my devices and did my best to understand what would happen.

I started with an empty external hard drive. The Microsoft tool backs up everything you select onto the hard drive including all the users' preferences and such things as e-mail passwords from with Outlook, and after the install recovers them all back again.

It is a long old job. I started at 8.30am and worked on it for a whole day.

I was installing onto a Dell Inspiron, 6 years old. The process ran reasonably smoothly. After Windows 7 was on and all the data restored I installed all the necessary applications.

I had MS Office 2003 before, but I installed MS Office Professional 2010 afterwards. I have no reason to think that you couldn't install Office 2007 from the disks.

Somewhat tricky was to install the drivers for my 12 years old Canon scanner. All the pointers were that there was no driver available. However I downloaded the most recent driver, i.e XP driver, and installed it manually overriding all the warnings.

After it is done, you will have to allow a long time for Windows Updates to apply all the updates since Windows 7 was first released.

This was not a nightmare for me as I have a 38MB fibre broadband Internet connection, but would take a long time on a slower link.

Best of luck!