Last night I installed Windows 7 onto a machine that I had built for a friend. Besides a issue with some RAM the building of the machine was a snap.

So I go to install the 64 bit version of Windows 7 upgrade, since this was a new machine, I didnt want to have to go to the trouble of installing his copy of XP, then do a clean install of Windows, so I wanted to see if Win 7 behaved the same way previous versions of Windows upgrade versions workd, which is: Windows looks for a copy of the OS, if it isnt present, then it will ask for you to put a copy of the old OS software in the floppy drive or CD.

It didnt ask instead it asked if I want to upgrade or do a custom install. I choose custom and spend the next hour installing the software. All went well until it asked for the product key. I entered in the key on the box and it said invalid key. I entered the XP key in, same thing. After a bit of searching I find out I have to install XP first. It would have been nice to know that ahead of time so I woulnt have to install an OS three times on one machine in a span of 3 hours.

My guess is the disks that come in the "upgrade" package are full installs, and only the keys are different depending on if the "windows.old" directory is on the hard drive.

On a positive note, if found all the drivers nessesary for the machine to run properly, though I will probably upgrade the video drivers.