XP to Windows 7: Should you Bother?

Regular readers know that we've been enjoying running Windows 7 on several machines here, ranging from a 5 year old laptop and a newer laptop to an HTPC and my main Photoshop machine. But except for one upgrade from Vista to Win 7 the rest have been "clean" installs--requiring the re-installation of all applications. But this week I decided to take the plunge and try to upgrade our workhorse Quicken & Email machine from XP to Windows 7. Read on to see if this adventure is in your future...First, I did a full system backup using Norton Save/Restore. I wanted to make sure if the system got wrecked I could get back. Second, I made sure I had another machine to work on while I experimented, both because I expected the process would consume a lot of time and because I sure didn't want to be sitting around waiting for it. Finally, since Microsoft has unfortunately not provided a direct way to upgrade from XP to Windows 7 I decided to try to upgrade "through" Vista for starters, before trying Laplink's PCMover software (currently the only direct migration solution on the market for XP to Windows 7).

Beating my Head Against the Wall

After several time-consuming attempts to upgrade from XP to Vista I almost threw in the towel. Dutifully I ran the Vista Upgrade Advisor and it said the process should go fine, although "some applications might not work after the upgrade." Fair Enough. But first the upgrade crashed, then re-running it got some complaints about pieces of Microsoft's own software that had to be un-installed, then after that was taken care of it ran for hours, started the install of Vista and eventually announced that it had "failed" with no meaningful error information and no alternative but to allow it to rollback to XP. Sigh.

Laplink PCMover Reprise

So I decided to bite the bullet and try PCMover. I did this with some trepidation as the last time I'd tried it several years ago to try to get to Vista it was worse than doing the conversion manually. However the newest PCMover is much improved. Ironically the best of the PC migration tools, AlohaBob, was bought by Microsoft several years ago and despite many promises to reintroduce it as "Microsoft Easy Transfer Companion" it has been mostly invisible since then. Microsoft does offer a variety of "Easy Transfer" tools but none of the current ones move applications--although hope springs eternal that they will release an application mover when Windows 7 actually ships to retail.

In any case, Laplink has provided a compelling $15 early-bird price for the simplest version of PCMover for those wanting to take the plunge before October 22. This version allows a simple in-place upgrade of a single machine. If you're purchasing a new machine for the cost of the required PC Mover Home is $40. The in-place upgrade is actually pretty cleverly designed. Instead of requiring the time and space consuming process of building an entire "moving van" of many tens of gigabytes it builds a sort of recipe that it uses to move & relink needed files back from the \WINDOWS.Old folder where the Windows 7 installer puts them back into \WINDOWS and then adds back the required registry entries to hopefully re-enable the applications and settings.

The first trick in this process is not to panic when PCMover creates a tiny moving van file. I ran it twice before realizing that it wasn't actually keeping my data in the file, just the instructions on how to put it back in its new home. The second trick is that after you've installed Windows 7 and you run the process to upgrade the applications, you can either choose Copy (which needs enough space to make a full duplicate of all the files) or Move (which simply relinks the files from Windows.Old to Windows). I didn't realize that and filled up my disk the first time I tried it. The second time I realized I had to choose "Move" since I didn't have enough space for two full copies of my files.

Trouble in River City: What Didn't Work

The process itself was smooth enough. I ran the pre-move process, installed Windows 7 to the same System Drive, and then ran the post-move process. So far so good. But unfortunately my work had only just begun. While the system did boot into Windows 7 it clearly wasn't very happy. Some of the problems, like AVG anti-virus and PGP Encryption not working, were more or less expected. But my Outlook data file was improperly set up so I didn't have permissions to open it--so Outlook refused to start until I figured out the problem and changed the permissions [I think this is a bug in PCMover. Because my Outlook data file happens to be in a non-standard location, despite setting up my account the same way on the new machine it didn't realize it had to assign that file to my account the way it did with files in their regular locations].

For the most part my devices worked well. Interestingly the ATI Radeon X1600--not all that old a video card--does not have and according to ATI will not have Windows 7 drivers. They have moved it to their "Legacy" category and provide a Vista driver which worked about as well as the version which the Windows 7 installer had already. But it is a good cautionary note to remember that if you have a machine old enough to be running Windows XP it is quite possible that some of the key devices like the video might be viewed as legacy by their manufacturers so you'll be on your own. However, given the complete success we had upgrading a Sony S150 laptop to Windows 7--a machine that Sony has not provided a new video driver for since 2004!--I'm a lot less apprehensive about driver issues with Windows 7 than I was with Vista.

How Many Passwords Do You Have?

More troubling was that all of my passwords were lost. This might be documented someplace, and might be unavoidable, but certainly for anyone with a lot of different web and email passwords it is a somewhat painful process to re-enter and re-save them all. It made me wonder whether the Microsoft settings transfer tool would have done a better job on this piece. But of course the Microsoft tool wouldn't have moved my applications, so my next step was to see how they fared...

Quicken came across perfectly as did several smaller utilities including my Colorvision software and the rest of the Microsoft Office Suite. However, Adobe Creative Suite was a disaster. I'd tried to do the right thing and de-activate it before the transfer but got the familiar 194:1 Error and it wouldnt' de-activate. Since I know from experience that Adobe doesn't really have a solution to de-activation in that case, I pressed ahead and installed Windows 7, figuring I'd sort out Activation when I got there. To my surprise Photoshop wouldn't even start after the move. It complained about the licensing not working and said it'd have to be un-installed and re-installed (of course more work than just doing a clean install and not having bothered trying to upgrade in the first place).

For some reason even the re-install wouldn't work so I had to let the machine grind through un-installing the entire Adobe Creative Suite and then re-installing. Amazingly enough after the re-install the Adobe products seem to still be activated.

Some Sick Entertainment...

The most amusing part of the entire experience was listening to a Goldman-Sachs analyst insisting to a sceptical CNBC commentator that upgrading from XP to Windows 7 would be easy and that she was going to upgrade her 9 year old computer on October 22nd and make sure and report the results. Aside from wondering what in the world makes anyone who hasn't upgraded the software on their PC for 9 years think they are qualified to issue pronouncements like this to a national TV audience I also wondered what hardware in her 9 year old machine could possibly be worth salvaging with an OS upgrade. Separately perhaps it says something about Microsoft that the analyst who covers them at Goldman-Sachs is still running a 9 year old machine with a 9 year old Operating System (which by my count would actually be Windows 2000). Maybe she's switched to Mac in the meantime?

The Bottom Line

Well, aside from the learning experience I can't say I'd recommend this whole process unless you have some really great hardware stuck running XP that you want to keep for at least another year or two. Otherwise you'd be much better off getting a new machine and then either using the Microsoft transfer tools or PCMover Home to move your information as best as you can. Remember that the Windows 7 Upgrade license can cost you upwards of $100 (a sore point with all those who suffered through the Vista years) while a new computer can be had for as little as $500 including a Windows 7 license and quite likely with better hardware specs than anything you are still running using XP. A clean install is also a great time to move from 32-bit to 64-bit, so you can take advantage of more than 4GB of memory. That's been the biggest improvement on my main Photoshop machine which I moved from Vista 32-bit to Windows 7 64-bit. Now it can use all 8 GB of memory.

NOTE: Even if you run the 32-bit version of Photoshop (like I do since the nik filters only run in 32-bit), a 64-bit OS is still a huge help. Now Photoshop can use over 3GB of my computers memory leaving plenty for all the other applications, while under a 32-bit OS the entire machine only got a little over 3GB so Photoshop could never reliably count on more than about 1.5GB.

That said, having upgraded the machine to Windows 7 I'm mostly happy that I have done it. It feels snappier and looks better. One reason I upgraded was a hope that the Blue Screen of Death I'd been getting once every few nights would go away. So far it hasn't (had one last night), but at least with Windows 7 the machine automatically rebooted rather than greeting me with that friendly looking BSOD first thing in the morning.

To Take the Plunge

If you're considering upgrading a computer from Windows XP or Windows Vista to Windows 7, or want to move your existing data, settings and applications to a new machine, here are some resources:

Microsoft's official rules & tools.

Laplink Website: Home of PCMover.

As always please let us know your thoughts and experiences in our User to User forums on nikondigital.org or by commenting on this post.

FCC Required Disclosure

No animals or software was harmed during the creation of this blog. No cash, products or other compensation were received. I paid Microsoft and Laplink for the software used, they didn't pay me.