Upgrading Vista to 7

[MJK]

My mom has a PC and wants to upgrade. What are my options? What exactly do I need to buy to get this done for her?

Thanks!

[Caged Great]

It does depend on what version of Vista you have. If you have Vista Ultimate for example, you won't be able to upgrade to Window's 7 home basic. For that, you'll need a complete reinstall.

[MJK]

Windows Vista Home Premium

[Vulcan]

I don't think there is much advantage to buying an upgrade copy anymore, just buy a regular OEM copy. Here's Windows 7 Home Premium for $116. A retail upgrade is $125.00 at NCIX. Retail is better for moving your copy from one computer to another.

http://www.ncix.com/products/index.p...t&promoid=1030

You can also buy the retail family pack upgrade for $200.00. This gives you three copies.

Another option if you are comfortable with this, is to buy a key on the net and download and than burn a DVD copy or find a friends copy.

http://trustpayjsc.com/categories/Operating-System/

[Clarkey]

Microsoft sold me shart so now I have to shell out an extra $100 bucks to buy new shart to fix the old shart. This looks awfully similar to the U.S. auto industry.

[RockOnRoberts]

Originally Posted by Clarkey

Microsoft sold me shart so now I have to shell out an extra $100 bucks to buy new shart to fix the old shart. This looks awfully similar to the U.S. auto industry.

Except in this case, the japanese cars are apple computers.

[photon]

Why upgrade?

[MJK]

I want to upgrade becuase 7 does seem better than Vista.

[ricosuave]

it is, as long as you have the ram

[Canada 02]

Originally Posted by ricosuave

it is, as long as you have the ram

what are the minimum system requirements? What the practical system requirements?

[ricosuave]

I dont know the minimum, 1gb I think, but I would do at least 2, and if you can, 3 or 4.

Will be just that much better.

[Vulcan]

Minimum for 32 bit is 1 gb, no sense going higher than 3 gb. 2 gb for 64 bit although like rico says 4 gb is better. I ran an old system on .768 gb for a while with no problems until I added another gb.

[Sluggo]

Id go for windows 7 its Windows Vista with patches so its Windows 6.1.

[ricosuave]

if you have trouble upgrading from a different version of Vista, try this trick:

Start > Run: regedit.exe
Go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion
Change the key : ProductName from "Windows Vista Home Premium” to “Windows Vista Home Basic”
Change the key: EditionID from "HomePremium" to “HomeBasic”
Do not restart.
Retry the upgrade.

Alternatively, you can try going directly to Windows 7 Professional from Vista Home Premium by changing the ProductName to "Windows Vista Business" and the EditionID to "Business".

Here is a chart to see what versions can be upgraded to which ones:


Worked for me just yesterday going from a beta version of Ultimate to a release version of 7 Pro.

Of course, a clean install is always better, but its worth a try.

Win 7 does an exceptional job of finding drivers, but to be sure, run this and burn the driver files to CD or USB stick or something to be sure you have 'em:

http://www.innovative-sol.com/drivermax/

[MickMcGeough]

Originally Posted by ricosuave

it is, as long as you have the ram

I run Windows 7 on my netbook with 1GB of Ram. Turn off the crap you don't need and it's not all that resource hungry.

[Rathji]

In my experience with the few machines I have ran Windows 7 on, it runs better than Windows Vista on machines with less RAM.

[sclitheroe]

Originally Posted by Rathji

In my experience with the few machines I have ran Windows 7 on, it runs better than Windows Vista on machines with less RAM.

Agreed. I run it in a 1 gig virtual machine, and for general Office + Web surfing it runs just fine.

[Canada 02]

I'm looking at a Dell desktop with Windows 7 (64 bit) that comes with 4GB of RAM; is it worth upgrading to 6GB or even 8GB?

6GB $45
8GB $95

[mykalberta]

I completed the switch on the weekend.

Went very smooth, its a very fast install. Some tweaks are needed to change things to the way I want them but so far so good.