Upgrade in Place: Hard
PCWorld is covering some of the problems people are running into with upgrades from Vista to Windows 7 - this one sounds particularly nasty:
in 7 Upgrade Woes: Endless Reboots, Product Key Problems 10/26/2009Call it the legacy of Microsoft's Vista operating system. PC users upgrading from Windows Vista to Windows 7 have run into a variety of hair pulling problems since last Thursday when Windows 7 launched. Complaints range from endless reboots to refusals by Windows to accept Microsoft's assigned product keys.
Now, it's easy to snicker at Microsoft, but they have a much bigger problem in an arbitrary upgrade than Apple does - and my Snow Leopard upgrade was hardly seamless. I've gone to a third party tool to set Time Machine backups to twice a day in order to avoid the "UI Freeze" problem that crops up for me when Time Machine starts.
And Apple has a mostly known environment into which upgrades fall - Microsoft has an effectively random set of hardware and software installatons that each upgrade request runs into. I'm not surprised that there are problems. Upgrading to Windows 7 is probably best accomplished by buying new hardware that comes with the OS.
Which takes me to an oft heard complaint - why not allow an upgrade from XP? Well, consider that XP came out in 2001. Tell me, does Apple allow an in place upgrade to Snow Leopard from Cheetah or Puma to Snow Leopard?
Comments
Snow Leopard Upgrades
[thumphrey] October 31, 2009 15:25:57.065
Considering that Snow Leopard (10.6) is Intel-only and that Cheetah (10.0) and Puma (10.1) were PowerPC only, doing an in-place upgrade would be quite a feat indeed. :)
Appreciate the collegial tone!
[Nathan Tuggy] November 1, 2009 0:17:04.149
James, thanks for treating Microsoft with a bit of decency in this situation; I suspect many Mac-lovers would welcome the opportunity to attack Windows, but instead you point out how challenging the environment is. I really enjoyed this post and the last one on this topic you did because of this.