Based on this article and this one too, both by Woody Leonhard, it looks like I won’t be able to do an in-place upgrade from Vista Ultimate to Win 7 Pro. I’m running Vista Ultimate on my desktop PC and my Inspiron laptop, and I was actually hoping to do an in-place upgrade on them both. Oh well. I guess if I’m forced to do a wipe & clean install, then that gives me the opportunity to switch from 32-bit to 64-bit too.
I was really hoping I could get away with an in-place upgrade though. It wasn’t that long ago that I did a clean install of Vista on my desktop PC, when I bought a new hard drive. It took a lot of time to get everything re-installed and set up after that. And, on the laptop, I’m a little worried about getting all the Dell drivers installed and working after a clean OS install.
I guess if I have to do it, I’ll figure it out. I’ll probably try 64-bit on the laptop, and see if it works. If it does, that’ll be great. I’ve never had a 64-bit OS on any of my Windows machines at home, so that’ll be something new. My desktop PC has a 64-bit chip too, but it’s an older AMD chip, so I’m a little leery of trying a 64-bit OS on there, without first replacing the motherboard and CPU with something more modern.