The Hard Upgrade Path From XP To Vista To Win 7

An anonymous reader writes "Microsoft executives have been telling the tech industry that if hardware supports Windows Vista, it will support Windows 7, but it now looks like that may not entirely be the case. According to CRN: 'But after a series of tests on older and newer hardware, a number of noteworthy issues emerged: Microsoft's statement that if hardware works with Windows Vista it will work with Windows 7 appears to be, at best, misleading; hardware that is older, but not near the end of most business life cycles, could be impossible to upgrade; and the addition of an extra step in the upgrade process does add complexity and more time not needed in previous upgrade cycles.' And here is CRN's overview of the difficulties Microsoft faces in asking enterprise users to walk this upgrade path: 'Across the XP-Vista-Windows 7 landscape, Microsoft has fostered an ecosystem that now holds out the prospect of a mind-numbing number of incompatible drivers, unsupported devices, unsupported applications, unsupported data, patches, updates, upgrades, 'known issues' and unknown issues. Sound familiar? That's what people used to say about Linux.'"

Comments

Just for the Record

[Todd Fisher]

I still say Linux has unknown issues.

Re:Just for the Record

[meist3r]

I still say Linux has unknown issues.

But at least I can actually run a computer while trying to figure them out ...

Re:Just for the Record

[MissionAccomplished]

Ask Donald Rumsfeld...

Tested on a beta...

[spun]

Seriously, I'm as rabidly anti-windows as they come, but isn't this a little unfair? Windows 7 is still beta, it doesn't surprise me that there are still some driver issues.

The idea that we will have to either buy Vista AND Windows 7, or do a clean install, just plain sucks.

Re:Tested on a beta...

[neokushan]

I get the feeling this article was deliberately misleading on several fronts. Here's an example:

Yes, this is an older, though not ancient, system we were trying to upgrade. Yet, it boggles the mind that the laptop upgraded fairly easy to Vista Service Pack 1 and then flat-lined with Windows 7. So much for the Microsoft mantra "If it works in Vista, it will work in Windows 7."

They claim that the machine they're running this test on did not boot windows 7 correctly, but did boot Vista correctly. This is only half the truth. They first installed XP, then upgraded to Vista, then Upgraded to 7 - something Microsoft themselves does not recommend. Then, when it all doesn't work, they blame Windows 7. They do NOT test if a clean install of Windows 7 worked without issues and I strongly suspect that it would.

No sysadmin in their right mind would ever perform a task like this, it's far too time consuming and ultimately pointless - why install an XP system, install all the software you need, then two two major OS upgrades just to create an image you can format other machines with? Why not just install a fresh copy of 7, then the appropriate software and image that?

Re:Tested on a beta...

[neokushan]

WRONG...
The *MICROSOFT RECOMMENDED* Upgrade path from XP to Win 7 is to do a COMPLETELY FRESH INSTALL[1]

[1] http://www.tomshardware.com/news/windows-xp-7-upgrade-vista,6965.html

âoeI can confirm that customers will be able to purchase upgrade media and an upgrade license to move from Windows XP to Windows 7 - however, they will need to do a clean installation of Windows 7,â a Microsoft spokesperson confirmed

But should it be that way?

[PontifexPrimus]

I'm not saying that this might not be the reality, but really, think about to the specs you mentioned: 2 gigabytes of RAM. A dual core processor. 80 GB hard drive.
And all of that just to get the operating system to run! I mean, what are office computers used for? I'd wager that 90% of "office use" consist of text processing, internet browsing, emailing and instant messaging. I used to do word processing on a 386! And it was fast!
I really don't want this to appear like a personal attack, but why the hell are people willing to accept something like this? It bugs the hell out of me that perfectly good computers - computers that have a hundred times more power than actually needed for the tasks they're used to - are thrown away because the underlying operating system is so greedy that it can't run smoothly with fewer resources than those you mentioned.

Re:But should it be that way?

[bertok]

My father asked me the same question once too.. why are PCs so slow and why is software so bloated?

I used a simple example of a text input field. You know, a text box, like the one you used to enter your Slashdot comment. Back in the 386 days, this was implemented using fixed point ASCII text, usually in text mode, and ran fast with a memory usage of a few kilobytes. These days, the total code & libraries required to implement a 'simple' text box might be over several dozen megabytes and would have taken many man-years of effort to develop. The code won't even LOAD on a 386 because it wouldn't fit into memory, let alone run at an acceptable pace.

But I hear you ask... why so complicated? It's just a text box! It doesn't need to do anything other than poll for keyboard input and display some characters.

Well... not quite. In a modern OS or application, even really trivial things like text input fields are fantastically complicated, and hence big and slow.

For example, a modern application would use a text box widget that can do most, or all, of the following:

- Undo and redo.
- Cut & paste, with automatic conversion of multiple formats.
- Mouse and keyboard based selection, highlighting, with automatic entire word selection.
- Alternate keyboard input (such as multiple keystrokes for a single asian character).
- Right-to-left and left-to-right text, including MIXING of the two, with proper handling of caret movement and selection highlights.
- Scrolling, horizontally, vertically, or both.
- text alignment, updated on the fly while typing
- support for all 40,000+ characters in the unicode character set, including various automatic conversions, font substitutions, and related processing. The lookup tables for Unicode and a basic font is several megabytes by itself.
- Combined characters. You know, like in tamil or arabic, where characters look different depending on adjacent characters or position in a word.

Newer controls ( as in WPF, for example ) can even do things like use your GPU to accelerate sub-pixel precision font rendering, kerning computations, and do full justification in real time as you type.

Take a look at "Typography in WPF" for an idea: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms742190.aspx

In the good old 386 days, almost none of that worked. You couldn't mix languages. You couldn't mix left-to-right and right-to-left. You couldn't use a mouse. You couldn't mix fonts on the screen, let alone within a control. Cut and paste was often unavailable, or limited in capability. Editing typographically complex languages was either impossible, or not WYSIWYG.

Examples like that abound. The inter-process memory protection that makes modern PCs relatively stable has a price. Virtual memory comes with its own overhead. Abstract driver models that let you "plug and play" aren't free either (remember IRQs? DIP switches?).

Get used to it, or go buy a 386 and try browsing the web with it.

Re:$2100 email machine?

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

I'm fairly sure that grandparent is referring to Microsoft executive Mike Nash's displeased email about "Vista capable":

"I know that I chose my laptop (a SONY TX770P) because it had the Vista logo and was pretty disappointed that it not only wouldn't run Glass, but more importantly wouldn't run Movie Maker," Nash wrote. "I now have a $2,100 e-mail machine."

Re:crazy

[Anonymous Coward]

Am I the only one who finds it humorous how some people bitch about Windows not being backward compatible and others bitch about all the problems due its backward compatible heritage?

Re:crazy

[Blakey Rat]

Wait... you think that, and you use a MAC?!

Here's a challenge: try to run a MacOS 9 application on your beautiful, shiny Macintosh. Can't do it? Hm. Weird, I can run like 95% of apps that old on Windows. Heck, try to run a MacOS 6 application on MacOS 7 and odds are good it wouldn't even come close to running right. (Yes, I'm still bitter about System 7.)

I mean, the funny thing is that I basically agree with you, but you holding that position and then using a Mac as your main computer is pretty mind-bendingly oxymoronic.

Re:crazy

[vux984]

I really can't imagine what they're thinking. If it isn't 99.99% compatible, it isn't getting on my machine. Whatever machine that might be.

oh? 99.99% or you don't install it?

I keep XP in a sandbox on my Mac and there it will stay

On your mac you say?

I'm curious, what did you do in 2001 when OSX was released? Did Apple give you 99.99% backwards compatibility? Hell no, not even close. Classic was decent, but people had to give up a LOT of stuff.

And what did you do in 2005 when Apple up and switched to intel? Did Apple give you 99.99% backwards compatibility to all your PPC and 68k stuff? Sure there was rosetta, and like classic, it was decent, but its not 99.99%. Not even close.

Criticising Vista and saying you'll only upgrade if the upgrade is 99.99% backwards compatible and then saying you use a Mac undermines everything you've said. Vista is WAY more backwards compatible than Apple even tries for.

Hell just from OS X 10.5 from 10.4:
Absoft Pro Fortran compiler - needs up update v10, previous versions - not compatible
Adept Music Notation 5.2.5 - not compatible
Adobe Acrobat 8 Professional - 8 - needs compatibility update, previous versions not compatible
Adobe Premier Pro CS3 - needs compatibility update (previous versions not compatible
Adobe After effects CS3, compatible updates required (previous versions not compatible
AdobePhotoshop Elements 4 and under not compatible
Adobe CS2 - not supported, not compatible
Adobe Photoshop Lightroom - 1.2 and earlier are not compatible
Adobe Premier Pro - 3.1 and earlier are not compatible
Alien Skin Eye Candy 5, Xenofex 1, not compatible
Alsoft - Disk Warrior 4 - "Alsoft recommends DW4 not be run from OSX10.5"
AOL - Version 10.3.7 and under not compatible
Apple Backup 3.1 and earlier not compatible
Apple Final Cut Pro 4.5 and earlier are not compatible
Apple iDVD 1,2,3,4,5,7.0 not compatible
Apple iPhoto 2 not compatible
AppleJack 1.4.3 not compatible

I could go on...and on...I didn't make it out of the 'A's...

Yeah for a lot of software if you had the latest version, they released a free update to make it leopard compatible. But if you were a version behind... better be prepared to shell out. Leopard wasn't anywhere near 99.99% backwards compatible... even with 10.4, never mind 10.2 era software, and of course OS9 is RIGHT OUT.

Meanwhile Vista/Win7 will still run a lot of DOS6 apps? Not all of them. Probably not anywhere near 99% of them, but an awful LOT of them. I still have a few programs and command line utilities I wrote in C++ for DOS in the early 90s, and they all run on Vista x64, not to mention the ancient Motorola radio programming tool that programs old Motorola 2-way trunk unit; it still works too.

I agree Microsoft screwed up the Vista launch, and backwards compatibility was less than ideal. But it blows away what you get from Apple. The only difference is that with Apple, I think people -expect- no backwards compatibility, so they don't blink when they have to buy the latest version of all their software, buy a new printer, toss their old MP3 player*, etc.

(* My old Samsung Yepp only came with OS9 and Windows software. I can still use it with Vista. I haven't been able to sync it to a Mac in nearly a decade (it didn't work in classic). I handed it down to my kids years ago; and it finlly got retired when I bought my youngest a new Sansa this christmas.)

Re:crazy

[Anonymous Coward]

Here's a challenge. Coat yourself in motor oil, and while you are shiny, try building a rocket-propelled, monkey-navigated Tandy 286 and see if you can get it to play COD4 against God and Jesus in a LAN party. Wait, you did it? Hm... Weird.

Re:Hardware works

[Blakey Rat]

No, I do understand. I've been using Macs my whole life. Apple moved from 68k to PPC without *nearly* the application breakage they've had moving from PPC to x86. The difference isn't the CPUs involved, the difference is that Apple simply does not care. Not even as much as they did a decade ago when they moved from 68k to PPC.

68k chips are a lot more different from PPC chips than PPC chips are from Intel chips. What technical reason is there that the Classic environment can't run in an PPC emulation layer? None. (Other than the fact that the Classic environment barely ever ran in the first place; it was a terrible hack that any other software vendor would have been too embarrassed to release.)

Of course you got modded up with your "correction" by pro-Apple moderators.

Re:crazy

[eikonos]

Then there's the fourth group: those who think MS should create an all-new Windows without the legacy crap with an emulator inside for backwards compatibility. It should be based on un*x (not DOS), should have a well-planned, polished GUI for regular people with command-line and options for power users.

Then there's the fifth group: those who realize that describes OSX and have already switched.