BANGALORE – Microsoft’s newest Operating System has been generating a lot of interest. And with lots of positive reviews coming Windows 7′s way, it would be quite tempting to try out the new OS by installing it in your PC. If you are a Windows XP holdout who has been waiting for something better than the over-bloated Windows Vista, it would be a great idea to jump over to Windows 7 with its fresh new look, and better features. To top it up, it doesn’t demand much from older PCs and can run just fine on netbooks.
But the big question here is – is it possible to upgrade to Windows 7 from XP without losing all users data and profiles? The answer is yes, although there is no direct upgrade option and unlike Vista you won’t be able to do an “in-place” upgrade from XP to Windows 7.
There are several ways to go about upgrading to Windows 7 from XP. One obvious way is to do a clean install which means you lose everything previously saved in XP. Another way would be to dual-boot both Windows 7 and XP which again means sacrificing a bulk of your hard disk space.
There is also a long drawn out way in which you upgrade to Vista first and then upgrade to Windows 7 which can be a very tiresome upgrade.
If you think the above ways seems too intimidating and not very inviting, don’t give up yet. You can migrate all user settings and profiles from XP to the newly installed Windows 7. But the biggest hitch you will encounter is that installed applications will not be ported over and you will need to manually install all the applications you will need in Windows 7. With some proper planning you can make this tedious task easier (this will be dealt with later in the article). Let’s look at how to upgrade to Windows 7 without losing all the settings from Windows XP and the various steps you need to take for a smoother jump to the new OS from XP.

Is your System Ready for Windows 7?
Before you decide to make the big jump, you need to know if your system is powerful enough to handle Windows 7. This should not be a big worry since Windows 7 is not as bloated as Vista and doesn’t take a heavy toll on system resources. Another good thing is that it can run on most netbooks.
The minimum system requirements listed by Microsoft are almost similar to what they specified for Vista — 1GHz processor, 1GB (32-bit)/2GB (64-bit) RAM, 16GB (32-bit)/20GB (64-bit) hard disk space, and DirectX 9 graphics device with WDDM 1.0 or higher driver. The only difference here is that Vista struggled on PCs with this minimum configuration but Windows 7 might perform better.
If you want to get a comprehensive lowdown on whether your XP machine can handle Windows 7, run Microsoft’s Windows 7 Upgrade Advisor. It will give you a bottom-line appraisal of your XP-based hardware and give you the green light, tell you the machine won’t make it or spell out what you need to beef up.

Preparation and Planning
After you get the confirmation that your system can run Windows 7, there are some preparations you need to make to avoid getting burned if something goes wrong during the upgrade.
First up, make sure to make a disk image of your XP machine as it exists now so that, if you later decide Windows 7 isn’t worth the disc it’s written to and you want to revert to the ancient XP, you can do so without a lot of hassle. There are lots of free backup programs for XP, which can create a disk image, a bit-for-bit copy of the hard disk. Macrium Reflect Free Edition is a very good choice and run on XP and let you create an image on a CD/DVD, external drive or flash drive (refer to box on how to create disk image with Macrium Reflect).
Another good thing to do would be to generate a list of applications currently installed on your XP system; since you will need to manually install all the programs you want in Windows 7. And also it would be a good idea to retrieve the license keys of the programs installed. For this particular task Belarc Advisor would be the perfect tool. It generates detailed info of your system including the list of installed apps and product keys and displays the result in the default Web browser.

Start the Process
The best way to retain all XP user settings and data would be by using the Windows Easy Transfer utility included on the Windows 7 DVD. It will help you back up and then restore the settings and data to Windows 7. Pop in the Windows 7 DVD while running XP, navigate to the “Migwiz” folder from the “Support” directory and run the “migsetup.exe” file.

Using the Windows Easy Transfer Tool
From the window that opens, click on Next and select the mode of backup — from one PC to another, through the network, or to a hard drive (local or external). Next, click on the “This is my old computer”. The wizard will check what all can be backed up and restored and display it accordingly. Select the items you want to transfer to Windows 7 and you can also specify a password for the transfer file. After you click Save, specify the location you want to save and it will be stored as a file with the .MIG extension to the location you specified.

Install and Transfer Settings to Windows 7
Now, you can start installing Windows 7. Run the “setup.exe” from the root folder of the DVD. After clicking on the Install now button, you will be presented with two options — install with the latest updates (Net connection required) and install without updates. After selecting the appropriate option, you will then be given the option to choose between “Upgrade” and “Custom (Advanced)”. As mentioned before the clicking the “Upgrade” option will throw up an error informing that it is not possible to upgrade directly from Windows XP. So select the “Custom (Advanced)” option. When you are asked to specify where you want to install Windows 7, choose the partition where XP is currently installed.
After the installation is complete, restore XP settings to Windows 7 with the help of the Windows Easy Transfer utility. Go to Start-> Start ->All Programs ->Accessories->System Tools-> Windows Easy Transfer. Select “An external hard disk or USB flash drive” and choose “This is my new computer”. Click “Yes” when you are asked if you have saved your file on an external hard disk and navigate to the .MIG file that you have previously saved. After you click on the “Open” button, you will be able to choose what items to transfer to Windows 7. Select the appropriate items and click on the “Transfer” button. Once done, all your files and settings which you saved from your XP installation will be available in Windows 7.

Apply the Finishing Touch
Now with Windows 7 installed and the required user settings and data restored from XP, everything seem in place. But to make the jump from XP to Windows smoother and trouble free, take a few moments more to do some post installation tasks.
If you navigate to the drive where Windows 7 is installed you will find that a Windows old directory has been created where all XP’s related files are kept under one folder. Since it takes a lot of hard disk space, it would be best to remove it. To do that you will need to run the “Disk Cleanup” wizard. Run it from Start -> All Programs->Accessories->System Tools. From the window that open up click the “Clean up system files” button and it will scan for previously installed Windows files. Then select “Previous Windows installation(s)”, click “OK” and then “Delete Files”.

Reload Applications and Drivers
As we mentioned above, you will need to reinstall all applications and programs that you want in Windows XP and you might also need to update some of your system drivers (normally Windows 7 does a good job of auto-detecting the drivers and installing them as required). Or you can use the service of Ninite which lets you install all the essential apps in one go.You can refer to the list of programs that Belarc Advisor was able to detect and start installing the programs you need. One thing you need to remember is that some of the applications that run on XP might not be compatible with Windows 7. You will need to check which applications are compatible and if needed you might need to use the latest versions of apps.

Installing from a USB Drive
As windows 7 can be installed only from a DVD, it might pose a problem for older pcs that doesn’t have a DVD drive (yes, there are some people who still has a CD drive installed on their PC). or for a netbook which doesn’t normally come with an optical drive. So, the best way to tackle this problem would be installed it from a USB drive. Easier said than done – for it can be quite tricky and complicated trying to make a bootable UsB and then loading the windows 7 installer files into it. But worry not, because there are couple of tools to easily make a USB drive bootable. The one we like is the Novicorp WinToFlash utility. With this tool you can easily incorporate all the installer files and at the same time makes it bootable in just a few steps and with just a matter of a few mouse clicks. The only drawback here is that you will need to use a PC with a DVD drive to copy windows 7 files from the installer DVD.