[ElkGroveDan]

Does anyone know if the full version will upgrade on top of an installed Vista system? I’m dealing with a balky hard drive that has a good chance of crashing during install, so I’d prefer to buy the full version and install it on a clone of the old drive on a new drive and save me the time and trouble of reinstalling all the software. However if that doesn’t go well I want to be able to fall back to a “start over” in which case the upgrade would be useless to me.

[dayglored]

> Does anyone know if the full version will upgrade on top of an installed Vista system?

I make it a habit to never do in-place upgrades of Windows. For that matter, OS-X either.

By the time I'm done fussing with the almost-but-not-quite results of an in-place upgrade, I would have been better off starting fresh with a new (and usually, larger) hard drive.

It's good to give consumer operating systems a fresh install from time to time.

Servers, no -- I have servers that have been in-place upgraded for over 10 years without a hiccup. But they're BSD Unix, which is designed to allow that. Consumer OSes, nah...

[msgt]

Does anyone know if the full version will upgrade on top of an installed Vista system?

To answer your question - yes it will upgrade Vista. It will not upgrade XP. I did an upgrade from Vista ultimate to 7 Ultimate with no problems, but I did do a fresh install and went to 64bit. (the upgrade was 32 bit)

[PugetSoundSoldier]

If you've got a balky drive, your best best is to start with good hardware; the only times I've ever had problems with Win7 installing was with buggy/failing hardware (once a hard drive, once a video card on its way out).

Drop $45 and get a new 320 GB HDD and do a clean install. Then once it's up and going, mount your old drive and copy the data over.