According to this page you need to re-install everything.
http://www.pcadvisor.co.uk/how-to/windows/how-upgrade-windows-7-from-xp-3514189/

cheers, Paul

You should check Lenovo’s support site to make sure there are Win7 drivers for your particular model.

Overall, I’ve had problems upgrading any PC from XP to Windows 7, because W-7 has a very basic driver package and on almost every PC that I’ve installed it on, I had to load drivers from a Motherboard driver CD or from an internet source.

My own very basic route to upgrading any PC to windows 7 is to make a clone or partition backup of C: so that if the upgrade goes poorly, I can restore back to my original OS.

The driver pack for Windows 8.1 is FAR superior to that in Win-7 and the Driver Package in Windows 10 is even better yet.
In fact, I’ve found the Driver Package in Win-10 is the best one that Microsoft has ever put out.
I’ve even installed Win-10 on a nine year old Dell laptop with only 1.5GB of ram, and had it come up with all the hardware Working. I’ve never seen that before, with any Microsoft OS.

Good Luck!
The Doctor

DrWho..thanks, good info.

I’ve upgraded several older XP machines to Windows 7 (mostly Dell and HP).
In cases where no Windows Vista/7 drivers exist (from MS or manufacturer), I’ve been able to use the XP drivers with good success ~90% of the time. For the others, I can usually find something suitable on the net.

Lee

Friends – Newby here to this forum. I daily use a Lenovo T-61 Thinkpad running XP. Dropbox’s dropping of XP is the last straw for me. I need to upgrade. I’m interested in upgrading to Win 7 X64 in order to take advantage of this notebook’s capability of utilizing 8GB RAM. Is there a known methodology of “upgrading” from XP to Win 7 X64 which would render my apps and tools and data (the ones which are W7 X64 compatible) intact so as to not have to reinstall each app one by one. Any assistance is greatly appreciated. ~Harvey

Make sure you have done a complete backup before starting, including making the backup software’s emergency boot disk.

As has been stated, you will need to do a clean install to move from XP (almost certainly 32-bit) to Windows 7 (64-bit). Therefore, you will need to reinstall pretty much everything, and that will likely include all of your drivers — chipset, audio, video, NIC (network adapter), etc.

As has been said, make sure that all drivers are available before making the plunge. It will be good to download all of the drivers to a CD or a flash drive before starting. But the one that you absolutely must have before starting is your network adapter driver. Having this driver will allow you to get onto the internet with Windows 7; and once you are on the internet, you can get all other drivers that you need.

If you can’t find the drivers on the Lenovo site, you may be able to get them via the VEN-DEV method. Basically, you go into Device Manager, and then right click on a device, and choose Properties. As you dig through the settings, you will find a four-character VEN (vendor) number, and a four-character DEV (device) number. Using these two numbers, you will be able to find whatever drivers are available for your computer by going to this website.

It’s a pain when you find an issue in Device Manager after going from XP to Win 7. I always try to minimize the hassle by running the portable version of Speccy on the XP system and saving the details as a text file. That way I at least know what hardware is involved. This makes it easier when searching for drivers.

(PS – Here’s the direct link to the portable build of Speccy[/B], which is at the very end of the webpage I linked to above.)

Hope this helps…

As an exercise, I first upgraded XP SP3 to Vista then upgraded Vista to Windows 7 (assuming you have the correct installation discs) … The whole exercise was tortuous and extremely time consuming, involving some driver updates etc on the way !
At the end of the day, the performance of Windows 7 was significantly slower than XP, so although the objective was achieved I did not consider it a great success !

Friends – Newby here to this forum. I daily use a Lenovo T-61 Thinkpad running XP. Dropbox’s dropping of XP is the last straw for me. I need to upgrade. I’m interested in upgrading to Win 7 X64 in order to take advantage of this notebook’s capability of utilizing 8GB RAM. Is there a known methodology of “upgrading” from XP to Win 7 X64 which would render my apps and tools and data (the ones which are W7 X64 compatible) intact so as to not have to reinstall each app one by one. Any assistance is greatly appreciated. ~Harvey

It sounds like you’d really like to keep XP. Here’s a thought: Why don’t you install Oracle Virtual Box in XP, and put something newer (e.g. Windows 7) in the virtual box? You should be able to access Dropbox via the virtual box. And by doing things this way, you wouldn’t have to reinstall anything.

On the other hand, you wouldn’t get to take advantage of the 8GB of RAM like you would with Windows 7-64.

I normally wouldn’t recommend that someone keep XP when it isn’t being supported by Microsoft. But if you would really like to keep XP, and you don’t want to have to reinstall anything, then this is a way you could do it.