Yes, I know you cannot go from WinXP to Windows 7. My question is: Is it better/faster to go from WinXP to Vista and then to Win7 OR To use the migration program which sounds like a pain in the butt having to reinstall. Will I have to activate Vista too just as an interim step?
assuming xp is installed on a ntfs partition and you have about 40+g free.... just fresh install win7... too much migration risk etc involved doing the double jump ... or single for that matter, then just install apps as you need them.... I don't see why anyone would ever upgrade... fresh install gives you the peace of mind of a, well, fresh install....
Backup files and Installation softwares, Browser bookmarks, etc. Clean Install. Restore backups, install programs, etc ??? Profit!
It's faster to install a fresh copy of Win7 rather than XP -> Vista -> Win7 as mentioned in the first post.
I had a friend that had a bunch of programs installed, and needed to keep most of them not to mention 200+ gigs of data that couldn't be moved off the drive, so I went the XP SP3 --> Vista SP2, updated drivers (important to update drivers you can just use WU but still update them) then upgraded to 7. The system runs just as well after that as it would with a clean install, but yes it takes a long time, this took close to 8 hours if not more but that was just because of the sheer amount of data having to be migrated.
I had to do this same thing. I tried so hard to get Vista so that I wouldn't have to do a clean install, but in the end, I just gave up and used Windows Easy Transfer, selected the network option and selected a spot to save everything, then did a clean install and got the backup.