• Lingering questions about Windows 7 upgrades

    Posted on October 17, 2009 at 07:20 CDT by • Comment in the Forums

    We still don’t know a lot about the Windows 7 upgrade DVD, which should be on store shelves on the 22nd.

    Reader DG wrote to me:

    I hope I didn’t miss this valuable information, but with the imminent release of Windows 7 are we able to perform a clean install using an upgrade version of the OS?

    If you’re asking whether you can use the upgrade DVD to install a clean version of Windows 7 over the top of an existing registered “genuine” copy of Windows XP or Vista, the answer is yes, providing you upgrade along one of the prescribed paths.  Ed Bott posted an excellent remake of Microsoft’s confusing chart that tells you what you can and can’t upgrade.

    But if you’re asking whether you can perform a clean install in other situations, it’s a damn good question. That’s one of the questions that, at this point, we don’t know the answer to.

    Hard to believe, but with less than a week to go until the Windows 7 official release, nobody’s seen the upgrade media. Or at least, the ones who have seen it haven’t talked about it. There are at least a dozen open questions that should be answered by about 12:01 a.m. on October 22. Yours is one of the most important.

    MS has an official announcement about upgrades on Brandon LeBlanc’s blog, but I, for one, don’t believe this statement:

    The Windows 7 [upgrade] setup process will look for a previous version of Windows on the computer during installation and if a previous version is not found, activation will not complete successfully using the Product Key for the upgrade license.

    I think we will find that the truth is far more subtle…

     

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