Windows XP to Windows 7 upgrades

IT shouldn't surprise many testers that Microsoft has shrewdly closed
the upgrade channel for users who will -- probably sooner this year
than later -- be making the switch to Windows 7. Many who had chosen
to steer clear of Windows Vista and hang on to Windows XP -- by all
rights, a decent operating system, at least for Service Pack 3 users
-- are pondering the nightmare scenario of having to upgrade to and
validate (which usually means, pay for) both Vista and Windows 7, if
it so happens that Windows 7 proves to be desirable or simply
necessary.

This led us to thinking: Windows Vista can run without being purchased
and activated, albeit for a limited time (usually 30 days). During
that time, it behaves as though it were a fully operational trial
edition (except for the Ultimate SKU, where several of the "Extras"
aren't available except after validating). But it doesn't take a month
to install an operating system; so what if a valid XP user could
simply borrow the promotional edition of Vista, if you will, to make
the skip over to Windows 7?

You can't download a trial version of Vista any more that runs on a
physical machine; the trial edition now is a pre-configured virtual
hard drive (VHD) that lets you test the applicability of your existing
software in a Virtual PC environment. So you can't make the hop to
Windows 7 via a downloadable version of Vista. And although you can
download a real, physical trial version of Windows Server 2008 (which,
after all, does have the Vista kernel), you can't install it as an
upgrade of Windows XP...just Windows Server 2003.

So it might seem pointless, at first, to say that the first tool you
need to make an XP-to-Win7 upgrade is a copy of Vista. But the key
here is that you don't need to activate Vista after you've upgraded
from XP to Vista, before you begin the upgrade from Vista to Win7.
This could give hope to XP users who do plan to purchase Windows 7;
all they need to do is borrow a friend's legitimate copy of Vista.

we intentionally used a very old, non-updated Windows XP Professional
virtual machine, with only Service Pack 1 installed. But very
importantly, Office 2007 was also installed. Because this was an old
VHD, we had to activate both XP and Office. But doing so at least
ensured us of an antique-like system in good working order, with real
working applications whose settings would need to survive the upgrade
as well. For the heck of it, we attempted a few tricks to see if
Windows Server 2008 could be made to install as an upgrade. Those
tricks failed, but not surprisingly. We also double-checked for the
availability of an evaluation version of Vista. No such version is
officially available from Microsoft's servers at present.