Main Area and Open Discussion > General Software Discussion

Help me come up with a Windows XP-->Windows 7 transition strategy.

<< < (5/6) > >>

Shades:
Are you the only user on the system or do you share it with people?

Only in case that you are the only one using the PC, you could jump to use portable versions of the software you like. That way it is a plain and simple copy of one OS to another to do the trick. Yes it is that simple. Most if not all your preferences are copied as well so you already gain a lot of time by not installing and configuring your software tools.

howardb:
Sounds like you have 3 basic problems: 1) You want to run and use your XP partition, while you are preparing windows 7 to run all your software. 2) You want to install your ``tons of'' software, from XP, on windows 7 along with, I suspect, various shortcuts, batch files, menus, settings that you created in XP.  3) I suspect you want to backup your XP AND windows 7 partitions, in case anything goes wrong.

So - start with 3 - make an image backup of XP, and put  it on some external or internal backup drive. Macrium Reflect or Paragon Backup both provide free image software for this. I highly recommend you also create bootable CD that allows you to run partitioning and/or backup software, and to access your partitions. Again, Macrium or paragon provide such CDs. They either use the win PE or a linux OS to accomplish this. By the way - paragon also sells ``adaptive restore'' software that allow you to install an old windows OS on a newer PC.

Then do 1) I suspect your disk has just one C: partition. Use a partition tool, such as Easeus partition Master (its free), to resize C:,create and format a second partition on your disk, and make the new partition active. By the way, this tool will also let you hide or change the drive letters of partitions, other than the bootable C: drive.

Now install windows 7 on the new partition, which it will see as C: Then, I recommend doing an image backup of win 7. It will be invaluable to cleanly recover from any serious future OS trouble.

Your windows 7 boot menu, should now allow you to boot to either 7 or XP. Whichever one you choose, will become drive c: for that session. If there are any problems, use a free tool such as Easy BCD (http://neosmart.net/dl.php?id=1) to edit the boot menu, as needed. Once setup, dual booting is quite painless.

Now you can do 2) the painful, way: Boot into 7 and slowly install all the tons of applications, shorcuts, etc. from XP to 7. I always keep all my setup files for this purpose, and there are tools that save installation info. for groups of applications, so future installs will be less painful.

If you want, you can try the shorter upgrade path from XP to vista to 7 -- on the XP partition. If it works, you simply use a partition manager to switch the former XP drive to be the active one.

If anything goes wrong, you are covered: You have a clean backup of win 7, and one of XP. And if your PC does not boot, you can boot from a CD and restore either backup, set one of the partitions as active, etc.

Armando:
I like these advices.  :up:

Daleus:
I don't have any suggestions for the transfer, beyond what has been offered here.

However, I have one if you discover software that does not run on Win7 - try Microsoft's XP Mode for Win7.

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/virtual-pc/default.aspx

This is a specially developed XP VM with some neat features, that I have started to use at work. We have a number of terminal programs and other assorted programs that won't run under W7.

With the XP mode VM, anything installed on the VM will drop an icon into your Win7 start menu (if it doesn't, just drop a shortcut into the "All Users" start menu). Drag it out to the desktop and when you dble click, the XP only app runs in an XP window, within W7! The VM is still there for further installation, but if you just run the app, you'll never see it. Locally mapped drives (USB etc) and network mapped drives will fall through from the host to the VM. This was a big help for our apps that need a network drive - there was no need to install the network client.

This version of the MS VM software runs much faster than the usual Virtual PC software and the best thing of all - if you use the supplied Win XP image, you DO NOT need an XP License.

Check it out.

Carol Haynes:
You beat me to it -Windows 7 XP Mode is an easy way to keep some XP apps (though don't expect to run games or graphically intensive applications in XP Mode as it will be slow and it uses an emulated graphic card so not ideal). Originally XP Mode was only available on Hyper-V (or AMD-V) CPU supported systems but Microsoft has sensibly dropped this restriction and now you can use it on any system with sufficient memory.

You do have to use Windows 7 Pro or Ultimate (if you have XP Pro you can upgrade) so although the XP image comes without paying for a license it isn't exactly free,

Navigation

[0] Message Index

[#] Next page

[*] Previous page