Now that Windows 7 and Snow Leopard are both out and Ubuntu 9.10 is all but out, it’s time to revisit which one is the easiest to upgrade

With the arrival of Windows 7 a lot of people are at least thinking about upgrading Windows. Alas, I have some bad news for you. Upgrading to Windows 7 from XP is very difficult, and Vista is proving troublesome as well.

That is, if you can upgrade at all. Many XP users with older PCs simply won’t have the CPU horsepower or sufficient RAM to run Windows 7 well. To see if you PC can manage it, download and run Microsoft’s Windows 7 Upgrade Advisor. Microsoft says you need at least a 1 GHz processor and 1 GB of RAM for Windows 7. I think it’s safer to double both those requirements before it will be worth your time to move from XP to Windows 7.

If you do have sufficiently powerful hardware, you need to be ready to re-install all your applications and data. There’s no built-in way to do an in-place upgrade from XP to 7. I haven’t tested it yet, but LapLink’s PCmover Windows 7 Upgrade Assistant claims to be able to make an in-place upgrade possible. Before trying it though, I’d, as Sharon Machlis suggests, back up everything in sight and make sure I have my software installation programs at hand. It’s not that I don’t trust LapLink, but with any upgrade like this there are so many things that could go wrong I want to be darn sure I’m not going to lose anything valuable.

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