As a Mac technician, I was faced with quite a challenge last week when one of our regular clients finally pulled the trigger and upgraded her office to all new iMacs. The challenge, was that she wanted two of the iMacs to be used primarily as Windows machines. The task was to take two machines running Windows XP and move one to Parallels 5 running XP and one to Parallels 5 running Windows 7.
Now, at this point, I’m pretty darn used to moving data from Windows 98, XP and Vista to the Mac platform; that’s a very standard service that we offer. Migrating XP to XP in Parallels 5 is actually very straight-forward. I was able to run the Parallels Transporter which is quite similar to Apple’s Migration Assistant. It did a beautiful job of moving over all files, preferences and applications from the old XP box to the new iMac and so far it’s been quite a seamless transition for that user from her old PC to her new iMac running Windows.
The big challenge was moving the Windows XP system to Windows 7. I did quite a bit of research prior to the consult and found that Microsoft has no built-in upgrade path from XP to 7. There’s a very clunky “Easy Transfer” app that will transfer settings and purports to transfer files, but I did not find it was up-to-snuff enough to be considered functional. An article from PC World offered quite a jarring statement about the XP-7 transition:
“Frankly, although in-place upgrades are convenient, experts always recommend doing a fresh install when moving to a new operating system in order to ensure the best performance and overall experience. Just think of it like Microsoft did you a favor by forcing you to do it the right way. You’re welcome.”
Really?! “Experts” think that it’s acceptable to tell all end-users to just start from scratch, and we should be “thanking” Microsoft for the honor and privilege of the hours, days, and weeks of stress reinstalling all applications, drivers, plugins, and then manually moving over all data, emails, addresses, calendars, etc. etc. As a Mac user, this line of thinking is just bizarre. Yes, in theory, there’s less of a chance of software corruption when starting from scratch instead of migrating data over. That said, most computer users are not techs and doing a full manual transfer is generally more than the average consumer can handle. Does that mean that any average consumer moving from Windows XP to Windows 7 needs to hire a tech to do the work for them? Is that really a reasonable thing to expect? I don’t believe so.
Oh, but there was one upgrade path! It’s possible to upgrade to Vista, and then upgrade to Windows 7 if you happen to have a machine with hardware that would support that transition and if you feel like buying a license for Vista which was so buggy that most people stayed with XP, hence the current upgrade conundrum. Again, this is unrealistic. A situation like this gives me great appreciation for the current Apple ads; if it’s this hard to move from XP to Windows why not move to a stable user-friendly operating system that offers great support and clear upgrade paths in the future? Move to Mac.
The story does have a somewhat happy ending. I was able to do the full manual transfer from Windows XP to Windows 7. Now, not all of my client’s software was compatible with Windows 7, and her professional Canon printer is not currently supported, but we expected some compatibility issues. Luckily, the printer works swell when printing from the Mac side. At least if one has to run Windows, running it on a Mac is the best of both worlds.