Windows 7 Migration
Zinstall XP7 Simplifies XP-to-Windows-7 Migration
Here's a hypothetical: The boss wakes up one day and decides that he wants Windows 7 on his XP-powered laptop. Now. Today. What do you do? What do you...
Here's a hypothetical: The boss wakes up one day and decides that he wants Windows 7 on his XP-powered laptop. Now. Today. What do you do? What do you do?
As you well know, there's no such thing as an in-place upgrade from XP to 7. So, most likely you'd end up configuring the new laptop manually, migrating the boss' files and settings with something like the User State Migration Tool, and so on. That gets the job done, but it's not exactly expedient.
Enter Zinstall XP7, a clever utility that turns a user's entire XP environment into a virtual machine that runs in Windows 7. It's about as close to a one-click solution as you can get.
Over at IT Knowledge Exchange, Ed Tittel calls Zinstall XP7 "remarkable," having used the program to deploy Windows 7 on a netbook running XP. Here's an excerpt:
When I loaded Zinstall and had it convert my XP environment to a VM, I elected the "convert in place option." Zinstall can also migrate the XP image from one machine to another across the network, or from one drive (the old system drive, presumably) to another (the new system drive) on the same machine. Everything I saw about the program, as constrained as my netbook was for memory and CPU resources shows me that the program is well-built, very stable, and quite capable.Obviously Zinstall XP7 wasn't designed with enterprise migrations in mind, but rather for individual systems. But it could be an ideal solution for a shop needing quick and easy XP-to-7 migrations of just a few machines (perhaps to gauge performance, app compatibility, etc.). Zinstall charges $89 for the software--but only if your migration is successful. Pretty good guarantee, no?
