Netbookz

Who says Microsoft never get anything right? Well… quite a lot of people.

[photo by bfishadow]

But in this case they’ve done something great: Released a (fairly) simple tool allowing netbook owners to download Windows 7, drop it onto a USB drive, and upgrade their netbook straight from that.

Why’s that so good? Well prior to this, you had to buy a DVD writer, or fiddle about in some very complicated ways to try and upgrade.

You could download Windows 7 direct to your netbook and run it direct from the hard drive. But, as you would be upgrading the Operating System from within itself, things could get very, very messy.

How Does It Work?

1. Buy Windows 7 online and choose to download it as an ‘ISO’ file.
2. Download a copy of the ‘Windows 7 USB tool’ installer from Microsoft
3. Run the installer & go through the installation instructions
4. Run the actual program, tell it where your downloaded copy of Windows lives, tell it to copy to your USB drive.
5. When it’s finished copying, go to the directory listing for your USB drive and run ‘Setup.exe’

Could it be simpler?

Well, it’s fairly simple, but there are some bits to watch out for if you’re going to do this:

• A couple of minor BIOS tweaks are needed. If you don’t know that that means, chances are you’ll need to do some googling before attempting this!
• If you’re upgrading from XP (as virtually every netbook user would be), you’ll need to back up all your important files and your applications beforehand, and then reinstall them after.

More Info

• Details of the tool over at the Microsoft Store
• Computerworld’s FAQ on how to upgrade from XP to W7
• Microsoft’s instructions on running the tool

If you’re planning to do this, let us know how smoothly it goes!

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Take a look at these related posts:

1. Netbook App Store
2. Windows 7 Netbooks