This is seriously Microsoft's Windows 7 upgrade chart, and it's ridiculous. It manages to highlight the insanity of shipping multiple OS versions while totally minimizing the good news: most Vista users will be able to upgrade in place to the corresponding 32- or 64-bit version of 7. That should cover the vast majority of people running Vista, but if you're still on XP or you're trying to do anything out of the ordinary you'd better get ready for some pain: all those ominous blue boxes require you to back up, wipe your drive, and reinstall a totally clean copy of 7. You heard that right -- the Windows 7 installer won't even try to retain your data and programs if you're not updating from the corresponding version of Vista. Pretty lame move, considering Microsoft is currently selling millions of copies of XP on netbooks and will
sell XP downgrades until 2011 -- sure, we get that most netbook owners aren't going to spring for 7, but it's insane that you can't just pop in a disc and upgrade. Of course, now that 7's been
released to manufacturing and the
final bits are available there's not much to be done, so let's all just take a moment to contemplate the fact that Ed Bott at
ZDNet managed to totally outdo Redmond's infographics people with a much friendlier chart with "about an hour" of work -- check it below.
Read - Original chart at AllThingsD
Read - Ed Bott's revised chart
posted August 6th 2009 4:29PM
Holy crap, get over it. Yes, there's mulitple versions. Deal with it. I don't need stuff in the Ultimate Edition on my gaming computer, so I'm getting Home Pro.
And why are you making a huge deal over losing data? You're forever telling people to back stuff up, now you're whining about it. When I installed 7 x64 over Vista x64, I backed everything up to an external drive in about 30 minutes, then it actually saved everything anyway. Who gives a damn if I have to spend 30 minutes re-installing some drivers and software (btw, 7 installed every driver automatically for me anyway). The biggest hardship was that I had to spend 30 minutes reinstalling Office 2007, but you know what I did? I got the f**k over it and didn't write a big article sh**ting on Microsoft simply because it's Microsoft. Whenever Apple do something you all form a queue to toss Steve Job's salad.
Snort, I'm not a mac fan boy, but this is one area where apple gets it right
Tiger -> Leopard done, soon Leopard -. Snow Leopard. No confusion, no stupid charts that make your brain hurt trying to figure out what to do (try being the IT buyer for s small company, it's enough to make not walk but run to apple).
All of this multi version shit is complete BS, and has surrounds the vagaries of corporate purchasing features vs. feature bloat and insane incremental over pricing.
How should it be for consumers?
WIndows XXX/Vista/95/XP -> one price, Windows 7, Done.
Chart is missing XP 64-bit.
Honestly the best way to install an OS is to wipe and reload, many people fuss about different OS's and problems but the problem stems from them upgrading and upgrade. Scared to take the plunge. ALOT of NON computer savvy people are using a version of XP that was upgraded from 98 or Win 2000, they just got used to the way their computer runs. Now when you upgrade that to 7 BOOOM!!! all the lingering problems that you were able to ignore have manifested into a big problem. Now things don't work and you blame Windows.
Peoples lack of organization (keeping all documents in a single folder structure) therefore making the upgrade more complicated and more high risk.
People don't realize that when you do a clean install with all the right drivers your PC is running at PEAK. I always do a clean install.
Snow leopard upgrade chart has one box: |in-place upgrade|
Yeah, I think there should be two versions of Windows -- one that allows you to select the components to install (like Win98 functioned) and another Business/Server version. Windows should have been 64-bit long, long ago... so I won't get into that argument.
However, I'm not paying triple the amount for Apple hardware - which is now the exact same components as any plain PC - to have 10% of the software available to me.
If Apple would set their prices at a reasonable level, I would probably have bought one already. But that will never happen.
The commercials are funny, very funny. Especially, the one which suggests that Apples never get a virus. I'm a PC user and I've never had a virus because I don't do the things that "attract" them: that means Porn and Piracy.
This article makes it sound like performing a clean install is a terrible thing. A clean install is worth the extra time (which is really not much) and a clean install is ALWAYS better than an OS upgrade. Performing an upgrade leaves thousands of files behind, from the old OS, that will never be used again. There is ALWAYS a lot of space wasted by these files.
Backing up and performing a clean install just takes a little time, but it is still painless. It just forces you to get your backups up-to-date, one thing that most people fail to maintain.