ZINSTALL WINWIN REVIEWS INSTALL
Speaking of which, you want to make sure that you have plenty of extra room to install Windows 7 as well as the working copies of Zinstall’s files too. The process will take several minutes to an hour to complete, depending on how large of a hard drive you have. Choose the “only have this PC” and that you are doing an in-place migration and then hit the big GO button as you can see in the screen shot below. Zinstall actually supports two different migration scenarios: besides the in-place one, the other is to migrate between two different computers. Once that is done, you can start up Windows 7 and install the Zinstall software. Now you install Windows 7, making sure to boot from the install CD and choose the custom in-place install option where it copies the Windows OS and all your applications to that “windows-old” directory. Next, you need to disable your firewalls and uninstall any anti-virus software. If you want to experiment, make sure you use a drive imaging tool (I use Acronis or Symantec’s Ghost) to create a backup copy of your XP desktop first. But no matter how many times I tried, I couldn’t get a stable machine from the product, and so I can’t recommend Zinstall until they do some additional quality control. It is a neat trick, and I really wanted it to work. Zinstall works by taking the “windows-old” directory that the Windows 7 installer creates and uses it to rebuild your original XP desktop. You also need to reinstall an entire XP desktop on the virtual machine from scratch. This Web page on Microsof’s site is that XP mode is only supported with limited “V-chip” CPUs.
This sounds a bit like what Microsoft supports with its XP mode for Windows 7, but not quite.
It creates an XP virtual machine with all of your old apps and files that is just a mouse click away. But if you want to be able to preserve your XP desktop and switch back to it when you need to run an application that doesn’t work on Windows 7, then you should consider Zinstall’s XP7. If you are looking for in-place migration of XP desktops, you could use Laplink’s PC Mover.