Microsoft provides no direct upgrade path from Windows XP to Windows 7.
But then again with millions of PCs running Windows XP that are up to 10 years old it would have been a tech nightmare offering this solution. (APPLE does not offer this for their own system upgrades from 2001 either.)
This week I have managed to do a clean install of Windows 7 on a 5 year old DELL Inspiron D800 laptop and it installed without a hitch. The only extra work was manually re-installing the graphics drivers from the Dell support website, as the default one that came with Windows 7 did not offer the screen resolution I needed. But that took only a few mins. of my time.
So I now have been abale to breathe a new lease of life into some old hardware – something that Windows Vista couild not do on this old laptop.
Here in this CNET video you can get a quick overview of how to upgrade Windows XP to Windows 7.
In the video it mentions the Windows 7 Upgrade Advisor.
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Regards
Marc Liron – Microsoft MVP
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