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Upgrade XP to Windows 7

gamerguy2

gamerguy2

Member
Hello.

I was Christmas shopping for family. I could not figure out what to buy a family member. Then, I remembered that he was using Windows XP. I wanted to buy an upgrade to Windows 7 for him. XP is no longer supported and its a good gift.

Any suggestions of the best way to buy an upgrade and where to buy the upgrade to Windows 7 for him?
 
XP is supported until April 2014. A direct upgrade can't be done - but a clean install with an upgrade version of 7 is OK. It will require total reinstallation of all progs and apps. The best thing for your gift is a retail upgrade disk. Just shop around for the best price. You might also be able to download a ISO file and create the disk.
 
corkyg said:
XP is supported until April 2014. A direct upgrade can't be done - but a clean install with an upgrade version of 7 is OK. It will require total reinstallation of all progs and apps. The best thing for your gift is a retail upgrade disk. Just shop around for the best price. You might also be able to download a ISO file and create the disk.
Click to expand...
+1
 
If their computer is really old (before 2006) it might be a better idea to just buy them a new tower with Windows 7 already on it, as the OS might run worse than XP on it's hardware. You can find new towers for $250-400, which isn't much more than Windows 7 itself, I think, and would probably be less of a headache. This way you could just re-plug the XP tower back in if something screws up, or can sell it for $50 or give it to someone else in the house. Then again, I'm not very good at figuring out why things go wrong when it comes to updates, and there may not be drivers for certain old peripherals either way, so your mileage may vary.

It might help to actually ask them if they want to upgrade first before spending the money on either option though. I would probably laugh at someone if they gave me a box with "Windows 8" on it Christmas instead of April Fools day.
 
ninaholic37 said:
If their computer is really old (before 2006) it might be a better idea to just buy them a new tower with Windows 7 already on it, as the OS might run worse than XP on it's hardware....
Click to expand...

This. Remember when Vista came out, and everybody hated it? It wasn't because Vista was that bad, but mainly because Microsoft underestimated the system requirements for the OS. 7 wasn't that far away from Vista, but by that time system manufacturers had figured out what it took to run it well.

So if it's an early XP machine, this may not be a great idea, as additional RAM for the machine is most likely going to be on the pricey side as well.

Do you know what machine this family member has now?
 
Just don't get Windows 7 Home Premium. You get no Windows XP-mode for older programs that won't run under Windows 7 and your limited to 16GB of RAM. Get Windows 7 Pro.
 
Thanks for the help. He has a custom pc with quality hardware. Something else for Christmas this year.
 
Last edited:
So nice thinking from you gamerguy2 it will be a perfect gift you can buy windows 7 online you can search it on google you will find many options and merry Christmas to everyone
 
ketchup79 said:
It wasn't because Vista was that bad, but mainly because Microsoft underestimated the system requirements for the OS.
Click to expand...

To be fair RAM was massively expensive at the time when Vista launched and the greedy OEM's did a hard press so they could sell machines with as little as 512MB. Then they wondered why their customers were so unhappy.
 
Gunbuster said:
To be fair RAM was massively expensive at the time when Vista launched and the greedy OEM's did a hard press so they could sell machines with as little as 512MB. Then they wondered why their customers were so unhappy.
Click to expand...

Yep, I worked retail when Vista came out and the first "budget" desktop we got in was a Compaq with 512 MB of RAM. That was also the last PC we got in with less than 1 GB.
 
I'm still running XP Home, and am considering up-grading to Win7 pro or ? , I would like to upgrade to some version of Windows that will allow me to up-grade my main system components from time to time and not have to buy a new OS when I do.

What is the prefered OS?
 
The OEM version might (dell, hp, etc). For a retail version the worst that will happen is you spend three minutes on the activation 800 number.
 
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