It would have been a no-brainer had this been a two-year-old PC that Lisa had downgraded to XP to avoid the tribulations of Vista. But this machine, once a triumph of Sony hardware engineering, could easily be deemed ready to retire. After careful consideration, I finally decided to go ahead with the upgrade, taking careful notes and snapping lots of screen shots along the way. The XP-to-7 odyssey was an interesting one, with surprising results and several lessons I can share with anyone contemplating a similar adventure.
I found some surprises there as well. Part 1: Can this PC be upgraded? Should it? Although it had plenty of resources for its time, it can be upgraded in only the most limited ways. I was skeptical. The Windows 7 Upgrade Advisor said it would work. But see for yourself. Part 2: Assessing the upgrade options. With the help of image backup software, I was able to compare and contrast separate upgrade paths: a clean install, with and without Windows Easy Transfer, and a migration using the PCmover software.
I also considered and rejected a third option. In this section, the pros, cons, and tips for each one. Part 3: PCmover tries to do what Microsoft won't. The result is a process that can fairly be characterized as tedious. Next: Can this PC be upgraded? Those specs actually put this PC in the same league as the current crop of Atom-powered netbooks, performance-wise. But the screen resolution of x and the superb build quality of this machine, which has been well cared for, make it a better choice than a netbook.
Lisa has installed many, many programs through the years, using some only briefly and apparently never uninstalling any of them. The Add or Remove Programs dialog contained separate entries. Here's a small sample:. Not surprisingly, performance on this machine with Windows XP was somewhere between abysmal and unbelievably awful. It took more than four minutes to go from a cold start to a working internet connection.
Disk space was an issue as well. When I first looked at it this notebook it had only 8 GB of free space. When I was done, the system had roughly 30GB of free disk space and I had shaved a full minute off the startup time, although it still required more than three full minutes from a cold start before you could actually use this thing. It flagged the Toshiba Bluetooth stack as incompatible and alerted me to a couple other hardware components that might need updating, but gave the all-clear:.
With that reassurance, I next looked at cost. There are no other costs associated with this upgrade. At that price, I decided to plunge ahead, stopping only to do two full backups of the current XP image so I could restore things if necessary. A good OEM yes, they exist will include the right drivers, utilities, and hotfixes for your system to ensure that every feature on it works correctly.
This is especially important on notebooks, where getting webcams, biometric devices, and control buttons working perfectly can be a real challenge on a generic installation. In this case, though, the question is practically moot. If your company is large enough to have an IT department, then Windows 7 may offer features important to them, if not to the users. Microsoft has worked hard to make Windows 7 a good enterprise OS.
If your company is running on XP, it may be time to consider a mass upgrade. Alternatively, you might just allow Windows 7 to appear when you purchase new hardware. The corporate options and situations are too complex to offer blanket advice.
The logic is that once people realize that upgrading their old XP box is best done by purchasing new hardware, a Mac might seem a very attractive alternative to a new Windows 7 machine. None of this is intended as a slam of Windows 7. This is just the way the world has turned out and we have to deal with it.
What will I do? While Microsoft made little public mention of your voices, and CEO Steve Ballmer ignored your petition when we delivered it, it came up with a convolution called the "XP downgrade" that has in fact maintained XP's availability on the market in parallel with Vista.
But the question remains: Now that Windows 7 is officially shipping, was it worth saving Windows XP for? My answer: Yes -- but. Yes, Windows 7 is not the disaster that Vista was. But Windows 7 is no home run, either. I can't imagine people camping out for it or even getting excited in large numbers, as they would for a new iPhone or Mac OS X. It will also be interesting to see how many will "downgrade" Windows 7 to XP , an option made available for some editions of Windows 7 until April 23, , for those not yet ready to make the Windows 7 leap.
A Hewlett-Packard exec told me he expects many if not most businesses to "downgrade" Windows 7 to XP through much of And he expects almost no one to buy Vista after today.
The bottom line is that Windows 7 is better than Vista, and in many ways, it's technically better than Windows XP. If my company had forced me to adopt Vista, I would be screaming for a Windows 7 upgrade to ease the pain.
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