XP upgrade to 7 question

I have a Mac Mini (10.6.7) with a Bootcamp of Windows XP.. but I use windows xp mainly within parallels 6... I want to upgrade my XP to 7, but am looking for the best way to do this... I'm assuming it's better to upgrade my bootcamp XP and then create a new virtual machine, right? If I did that, would I still be able to use my XP vm? Also, would I upgrade using the 32 bit or 64 bit Windows 7?

Any suggestions, tip, hints, and pointers would be appreciated.. Thanks!

Jill

 

Hello Jill,

Yes, upgrading your BootCamp Win XP to 7 and creating a new virtual machine sound very reasonable. Once upgraded, there is no way to get Win Xp back, becasue the Boot Camp virtual machine has no its own virtual drive, it uses the BootCamp partition. Therefore, if you change smth in native Boot Camp, start Mac OS X, launch Boot Camp VM you will see these changes.

As far as I remember you can only upgrade from 32-bit to 32-bit, 64-bit to 64-bit, please do some more research on this since I am not sure

 

Hi Jill,

Unfortunately, you cannot upgrade xp to win 7. With a upgrade copy of Windows 7 (you can only upgrade from vista to Win 7) If you have an upgrade version of vista that you install, then you can use the win 7 upgrade. If not, you will need to get the full version of win 7. This is a Microsoft issue not a Parallels issue.

Kat