Parallels Desktop Upgrade to Windows 7 review

Windows 7's XP Mode, which is simply Windows Virtual PC running a free copy of XP, is useful for running programs incompatible with Windows 7. But XP Mode is available only in the Ultimate and Professional versions, and there's also the nuisance of having to reinstall all the affected applications.

Parallels Desktop Upgrade to Windows 7 attempts to solve this and other problems facing those wishing to upgrade existing XP (or Vista) installations either in-place or by moving to a new Windows 7 PC.

The result of a technology collaboration between Parallels and PC Mover developer Laplink, the software combines application migration with a virtualisation engine to produce a fully automated method of moving data and programs while simultaneously installing Windows 7.

For an in-place upgrade, it requires enough free space plus a Windows 7 DVD and licence. The installer is accompanied by an excellent on-screen talking-head video to guide users through the few simple steps, such as deleting temporary files and disabling anti-virus software.

Existing disk partitions are maintained, although multi-boot setups could be affected. All user settings are transferred to the Windows 7 installation and the virtual copy of XP.

Moving to a new PC with Windows 7 preinstalled can be done over the network, via an external hard disk, or using a Parallels' USB transfer cable (£5 extra). Again, the procedure is painless, although it can be very slow depending on the amount of data to move. A fairly bare XP installation with little user data took us well over three hours using a 100Mbit/s network. The transfer cable was noticeably faster.

A brute force approach is adopted when moving to a new PC, and any partitions and installed hard drives - apart from the Windows system drive - that contain data will be recreated as virtual drives in the Parallels Desktop, complete with all files. The idea is to ensure a 'no lost data' installation for novice users.

Experienced users not wanting to migrate particular programs can choose the custom migration option. All user data files and folders are migrated to the appropriate Windows 7 libraries, and are also shared with the virtual XP PC. Nothing is deleted from the old PC, though.

Windows 7 boots after the installation completes, and you're presented with a video tutorial explaining how to use Windows 7 and the newly virtualised applications.

Incompatible programs are automatically detected from a database, and these run in Parallels' seamless 'Coherence' mode, with an XP-like border around the program window for identification.

A Program Switcher applet allows programs to be forced (or not) to run in virtualised mode. Additionally, you can opt to have the Windows XP taskbar notification area merged with Windows 7's.

Windows XP can also be launched in windowed or full-screen modes, giving you selective access to the host PC's hardware resources such as USB drives and printers. Networking is configured initially in shared (NAT) mode, but this can be changed easily to host-only or bridged mode.

Note that moving to virtualised hardware will trigger Windows' Product Activation, and possibly other programs that use hardware-tied activation, and hence OEM XP licences are unsuitable for migration.

Overall, the program worked well in our tests, although a corrupted multi-boot setup unearthed a bug (now being fixed) that caused a failed installation. It struggled to run the virtualised applications on our 1.6GHz Atom netbook with 1GB of RAM, but that's hardly surprising.

It's an interesting approach to the problem of Windows 7 upgrades, although those unused to working with virtualisation may take a short time to get comfortable with the new setup.

In-place upgrade: 1GHz x86 (32-bit) or x64 (64-bit) CPU (hardware virtualisation required for upgrading 64-bit operating systems), 1GB RAM, free space - 25GB plus space occupied by Windows XP. Move to new PC: As above, but requires twice the amount of free disk space as used on existing XP installation.