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Windows 7 Upgrade Chart Revealed - Secret Decoder Ring Not Included

Posted by Daniel Shain

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When the Wall Street Journal's Walt Mossberg requested an upgrade chart from Microsoft, the company graciously complied. And the result was this rather hideous mess you see before you.

If we were to believe the marketing hype we've been hearing, upgrading from Windows Vista to Windows 7 should be fairly easy. XP, well, that's a different story, but nobody should expect the 2-OS-jump to be quite as smooth as the 1-OS-jump, that's just common sense. So now I'm a user trying to get more details on the whole process, and I get this chart. What do I see?

It's hard to tell. Really. At first glance I see a lot of blue boxes and a few green ones, and a quick glance at the fine print tells me the blue boxes labeled "Custom Install" really mean I've got to back up my entire drive, wipe everything, install Windows 7 and then install everything I once had all over again. Ugh, what a pain. If I'm an XP user I don't see anything about me at all, until I read that fine print again and realize there is no alternative to a "Custom" or clean install. This doesn't sound easy and as a customer I don't feel happy about the hell I'm going to have to go through to upgrade my system.

What I don't see at first glance is that upgrading from every corresponding version (32/64 bit pf Home/Business/Ultimate) of Windows Vista to the corresponding version of Windows 7 is contained in a friendly green box indicating an "In-Place Upgrade" where I don't have to back up anything. Look closely and you'll see it too - it really is as easy as advertised. There isn't any saving grace for the XP users, but whachagunna do, XP is pretty old even if most people still use it.

Improved Windows 7 Upgrade Chart

If you thought (like I did) that Microsoft gained some marketing savvy with their latest set of Laptop Hunter ads, this is a stark reminder of how terrible the suits in Redmond can really be. It really seems thoughtless to release something this unrefined and overly complex directly to a journalist. Over at ZDNet Ed Bott took "about an hour" to fix up the chart into something legible, including an easy little trick to make things easier in a way the original chart doesn't even mention (see right).

About an hour. Think MS put that much time into publicly releasing a much sought after chart about their most hyped OS in at least a decade?

Walt Mossberg's mossblog (original post).

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