XP Upgrade Path to Win 7 X64

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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

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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

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

--Joe

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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 😎

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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

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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.

Group "L" (Linux Mint)
with Windows 10 running in a remote session on my file server

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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…

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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 !

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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 !

My 10-year old Acer desktop runs XP normally, Vista (free upgrade) was a hateful experience i quickly dropped, Windows 7 (a free preview at the time) less hateful but sluggish, but Windows 10 found all my hardware and coped admirably, and (to me) the performance is as good as XP. I would recommend the OP gets W10, which he either has to buy, as with W7, or if he has W7 already he can use its serial number and go straight to 10. W10 has its aggravations (esp to an XP user) but if he can’t stick with XP (the web interface of Dropbox will still work) it is the way to go.

I don’t think there is any way to avoid re-installing s/w, even if the XP is 64-bit (which it probably isn’t), and its probably worth the effort to get a clean installation. Be ready to hate the start menu if you are used to XP’s version!

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Re: Start Menu; Classic Shell still works great for Windows 10

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Windows 10 found all my hardware and coped admirably, and (to me) the performance is as good as XP. I would recommend the OP gets W10

I would probably agree with that. I have a client who had been running XP for years on a computer he used at his office. He decided to take it home (since he assumed that it wouldn’t be worth upgrading) and while working on another computer in his home I noticed that that computer had a Product Key label for Vista on the case. That got me to thinking…
I asked him about the history of that computer and he told me that, although it had been licensed for Vista he had asked BestBuy to downgrade it to XP so he could postpone adjusting to Vista at the time. He never got around to installing Vista and now he was replacing all his business computers with new ones!
I imaged his existing hard drive and then installed Windows 10 to see how well it worked.
It worked a charm! So, we bought a Windows 10 license and he thus had to buy one less computer for his office.

Since then I’ve installed Windows 10 on several more “Vista era” computers and almost all have been winners. Not blazingly fast, but they’ve worked well enough.

Image or Clone often! Backup, backup, backup, backup......
- - - - -
Home Built: Windows 10 Home 64-bit, AMD Athlon II X3 435 CPU, 16GB RAM, ASUSTeK M4A89GTD-PRO/USB3 (AM3) motherboard, 512GB SanDisk SSD, 3 TB WD HDD, 1024MB ATI AMD RADEON HD 6450 video, ASUS VE278 (1920x1080) display, ATAPI iHAS224 Optical Drive, integrated Realtek HD Audio

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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.

Group "L" (Linux Mint)
with Windows 10 running in a remote session on my file server

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