Walter Mossberg on Migrating to Windows 7

Walter Mossberg, the venerable personal tech guy at the Wall St. Journal, likes the new Windows 7, which Microsoft is releasing on October 22nd. But while upgrading should be pretty smooth for Vista users, XP users like myself are out of luck:

While this latest operating system stresses simplicity, the upgrade process will be anything but simple for the huge base of average consumers still using XP, who likely outnumber Vista users. It will be frustrating, tedious and labor-intensive. In fact, the process will be so painful that, for many XP users, the easiest solution may be to buy a new PC preloaded with Windows 7, if they can afford such a purchase in these dire economic times.

Long story short, most XP users will have to temporarily move all of their data to some other backup system, reformat their hard drive, do a clean install of Win7, and then experience the sheer joy of reinstalling all of your hardware drivers, applications, and application patches. (This is where my strategy using multiple hard drives comes in handy, because I can nuke my C: drive, where my operating system lives, without destroying any of my data, which I keep on other drives.)

I'll be sticking with XP for as long as I can.