I read an article last night and felt the need to make the virtualization community aware of it. It does not directly affect virtualization but it does affect our users and certainly our desktop admins.
Microsoft provided a chart to Walt Mossburg, a writer for the Wall Street Journal. It was a chart showing the upgrade options for users of XP and Vista and what options then had when upgrading. Walt felt the need to blog on the topic due to the complexity of the chart and limited options for some users.
You can read his entire article here or just take a quick look at the chart he posted here.
What amazes me (and Walt) is that there are 66 cells on this chart and only 14 of them are “in-place” upgrades. 52 of the cells are “custom install” Now I will be the first to concede that the majority of the users will fall into the 14 cells. However, if you were considering changing edition or moving to 64-bit when you went to Windows 7 the upgrade may not be very friendly. That means the users (or admins) must move their data off, install from scratch, and reinstall all their apps and copy their data back. Yikes.
Seeing an opportunity to poke a little fun, the guys over at cultofmac.com posted some similar charts for OSX. Pretty funny for a Monday morning.
August 11th, 2009 at 10:09 am
Ed Bott made a simpler and more accurate chart: http://blogs.zdnet.com/Bott/?p=1246
Major takeaways:
- No upgrades between 32-bit and 64-bit platforms (MS has never supported or committed to this)
- No direct upgrade from XP to Win7
- No direct upgrade between product editions
Windows Easy Transfer eases the blow, but upgrading is still a pain no matter how you slice it.
September 16th, 2009 at 4:59 pm
windows 7 is the greatest windows OS yet. your article was well written i look forward to reading more of your posts!