win 7 again

I'm confused. Please help! I want to upgrade from vista home premium to the 7 equivalent. But some of you guys seem to have had probs doing it as an upgrade. It looks like you have to do a complete back up and reinstall. But it looks like other posters dididn't have to do that. What's the truth?

In reply to a post by spranglebolt:

I'm confused. Please help! I want to upgrade from vista home premium to the 7 equivalent. But some of you guys seem to have had probs doing it as an upgrade. It looks like you have to do a complete back up and reinstall. But it looks like other posters dididn't have to do that. What's the truth?

You can do either ... A clean install where you back up data an then install win7 in about 20 mins and then spend time reinstalling your apps .. Or doing an upgrade where you wouldn't need to reinstall your apps (you should really back up your data)...

Thanks. Although the upgrade table on the Amazon website shows that inplace upgrade is posible, Amazon also includes the following, which certainly doesnt create confidence.

Windows 7 Home Premium, Professional and Ultimate are available both as full versions and as upgrades from Windows Vista. The full version of Windows 7 is also suitable for upgrading from Windows Vista; however, Microsoft UK is recommending that Vista users perform a custom (clean) installation. That means you will need to back up all of your files and settings, install the operating system, then re-install your files, settings and programs. (This also applies if you are running earlier versions of Windows such as XP.)

Clean install is always recommended since Microsoft can really not have any idea what manner of rubbish people have installed on their machines. So called 'security software' is the biggest culprit when it comes to breaking Windows.

John.

It seems that an upgrade to Win 7 takes a couple of hours whereas a clean install is 20 mins. A clean install means that all the rubbish previously collected is not there. Backing up data and settings is important though.

Hmm..... I did a clean install yesterday of Windows 7 Professional, and it took nearly an hour ! I think this may have been because there are a number of external devices connected (and a couple of internal cards) that Windows 7 had to detect and find drivers for.

In reply to a post by cavillas:

It seems that an upgrade to Win 7 takes a couple of hours whereas a clean install is 20 mins. A clean install means that all the rubbish previously collected is not there. Backing up data and settings is important though.

On the beta i saw 12 hours for an inplace upgrade

Thats strange I did a complete re-install of Win 7 a few days ago and had all my peripherals plugged in (printer, webcam, usb drive etc) and the total install time was 24 minutes from pressing the button to restarting for use. I only have a Celeron 423 and 2gb memory with a sata drive. Can;t understand why yours took an hour.