Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Upgrading to Windows 7

Planning your migration to Windows 7? Then you will want to check out the upgrade chart over at Walt Mossberg's All Things Digital.

It's a seriously imposing looking chart, with oceans of blue that represent "custom installs" and a seemingly random scattering of friendly green "in-place upgrades" from your existing operating system. But forget all that. It really is pretty simple, and I can break it down for you in 3 easy bullets:

• From Windows XP or Windows Vista Starter: It's a custom install all the way, baby. You can't upgrade, so plan to flatten your hard drive and restore your data from a backup.
• From Windows Vista to a like version of Windows 7: You can do an in-place upgrade, which will migrate your data and settings automatically. That includes:
  
  • 32-bit to 32-bit and 64-bit to 64-bit
  • Vista Home Basic or Home Premium to Windows 7 Home Premium
  • Vista Business to Windows 7 Professional
  • Ultimate to Ultimate
• From Vista to a dissimilar version of Windows 7: Custom install. What did you think, you could go from 32-bit Business to 64-bit Ultimate without starting from scratch?