What we don’t know about Windows 7 – and one thing we do

I’m getting tons of questions about the Windows 7 upgrade. The fact (as I mention in the next post) is that there are still a lot of unanswered questions. Here’s a sampling of what we DON’T know:

Will I be able to install the Win7 upgrade on a clean hard drive? (I read a rumor that the Upgrade DVD isn’t bootable.)

Can I perform a clean install using only the upgrade media, the same way I could with the Vista upgrade?

Will an activated copy of the Release Candidate qualify for an upgrade?

What if I upgrade a system then decide that I need to re-format the hard drive, or my hard drive dies? Do I need to go back and install a qualifying earlier version of Windows, activate it, then install the upgrade?

There are dozens of ancillary questions, of course.

Customers are spending millions on upgrade offers (both in the US and in Europe), without knowing what they’re buying.

One thing we do know for sure. In spite of Microsoft’s earlier announcement, the 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Windows 7 will ship on separate DVDs. How do we know that? DVDs aren’t big enough to hold both!