The most waited OS from Microsoft is here without any doubt, now you can find many blogs reviewing Windows 7 and everybody is giving the new OS a good review I believe, of course you can also find the radicals and the never happy people, yet in my modest opinion a good release for Microsoft all said and done. Yet there is something that does not complete the story.

When you purchase a operating system, you want a simple upgrading path, just go to a store and get your upgrade. Something that Apple did great with Snow Leopard, go home and upgrade your old operating system to what you just purchased. Microsoft had to add many version of the same operating system, that is ok by itself, yet you need to purchase the update that will let you install with your existing OS, whatever is Vista Professional or XP Professional. So if you purchase Windows 7 Ultimate you won’t be able to upgrade your XP Professional.

So Microsoft had to make it a little more complicated from that point and I still wonder why. Just let the user purchase one media for upgrade, detect what the user has and do the upgrade from there. But wait, there is more! Now the story still gets more complicated, for users that want to format the whole hard disk before installing the new upgrade the upgrade disk won’t detect the existing media to recognize you have the right to do an upgrade. In that case, I personally recommend to finish the installation before adding your license number and when complete you can go to the Start Menu and type license, open the license manager and enter your license, Windows 7 shall ask you to call Microsoft to

There are many users that want to format the hard disk to add a new operating system, and this is actually the recommended way, you really want to get rid of everything and let Windows 7 take care of installing itself cleaner that leaving other OS dlls on your hard disk.

Below is a fantastic table created by Paul Thurrott to understand why upgrading path you need.

Thanks Paul in creating this table, will make lots of users very successful in their plan to upgrade to Windows 7.

Cheers

Al

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