Windows 7 upgrade from XP question

I had ordered windows 7 back when they had the $50 pre-order price and now that it's the release date and i'll be getting it soon I was trying to find out about one thing i'm not sure now.

ATM my PC has an OEM copy of XP MCE, now when you upgrade it of course formats and wipes the old OS and i'm assuming that the upgrade is locked to whatever XP liscence used, now my question is does it pull the liscence info from the old copy before formating or does it ask for your activation code from the previous version?

I'm curious to this because atm I have an un-used full install copy of XP pro and I want the upgrade to be locked to a full install copy not an OEM copy since i'll probably be upgrading my motherboard in the next year and I don't want to have to buy another Windows 7 upgrade, so if it locks to the installed copy before formating i'm going to want to format and install and activate my XP pro and then do the 7 upgrade, but if I just have to enter the activation code and it doesn't look at the old one on the HDD then i'd rather save myself from that hassle.

Your upgrade copy of Win7 won't be locked to any specific copy of XP. The only requirement you will face is that if in the future you want to install Win7 on another machine, you must first remove it from your current machine, and the new machine must have a valid copy of xp or vista on it (so your current unused retail copy of xp would work just fine for that).

It is not advised to do an upgrade from xp... it actually says this on the box, it is recommended to do a clean install of win7 (upgrading from vista is fine)... something to do with win7 being so much different than xp... im not entirely sure

Great, thanks! I had just assumed it would have been locked to it, but i've never got a Microsoft upgrade OS disk, only done full and OEM's before.

sandyduff said:

It is not advised to do an upgrade from xp... it actually says this on the box, it is recommended to do a clean install of win7 (upgrading from vista is fine)... something to do with win7 being so much different than xp... im not entirely sure

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It's not that it's not advised, it's not posible, if you upgrade from XP to 7 with an upgrade disk it does a format and a clean install which is what I prefer anyways, I just wasn't sure how it delt with the liscence side of the upgrade.

shiltz said:

It's not that it's not advised, it's not posible, if you upgrade from XP to 7 with an upgrade disk it does a format and a clean install which is what I prefer anyways, I just wasn't sure how it delt with the liscence side of the upgrade.

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Ah right, just making sure you knew just in case it was possible and everything was screwy...

shiltz said:

Great, thanks! I had just assumed it would have been locked to it, but i've never got a Microsoft upgrade OS disk, only done full and OEM's before.

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Yeah I asked a bunch of questions on Microsoft's forums a long while back because I've got an OEM copy of Vista. I wasn't sure if that would mean the Win7 upgrade would effectively have the same OEM 1 machine limitation or if since the Upgrade disk is retail (not OEM) it would free me of my Vista OEM limitation and in the future I could move the both of them to a new machine.

It turns out neither is the case. The Vista OEM is still locked to its original hardware while the Upgrade Win7 is free to move to any new machine, as long as the new machine meets the upgrade requirements (having a valid copy of xp or vista already installed on it).