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Words Of Wisdom on 27 March 2010
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Soleron said:
Words Of Wisdom said:
Do not upgrade.

If you want Windows 7 then do a fresh install. There are all kinds of bugs associated with upgrading and Windows-centric forums are filled with people who upgraded and suffered random crashes, BSODs, and other failures... none of which you get with a fresh install of Windows 7.

A 500 GB HDD is pretty darn cheap these days ($50-$60) so just snag one and backup your files. Besides, an extra 500 GB is always handy.

Or partition. That will give you a fresh install but not require the extra HDD.

XP usually takes up the whole partition (unlike Linux's customizable / sizes) which means he we would need to shrink the XP partition.  I've seen cases where partition shrinking results in anything from damaged system files (very bad) to bizarre glitches (still bad) so I am not personally comfortable with it.  Granted this was a couple years ago and partition software (probably) has improved since then.

Still, I'd only recommend shrinking a partition when you can make a full backup of that partition just in case.  And, of course, if he could make a full backup of the partition then he wouldn't need to shrink/split it in the first place.

I think the OP should really look into a backup (IHD/XHD) anyway.  Just imagine if that one hard drive died.  He'd be SOL on all his data.  Really, if his data has any meaning at all (pictures, personal writings, things you can never just redownload) then spending ~$55 to make sure he never loses it isn't a bad deal.