Two of the tools (WAIK and SmartDeploy) make use of a new Microsoft standard called Windows Imaging File Format or WIM. Each tool has ways to deal with the variety of hardware configurations that you place the image onto. This gives you the opportunity to clean house and create a more managed environment, which may not be what your end users want to hear. Next, they stir in the particular applications that you want to deploy across your enterprise. The four tools all start out with a fresh copy of Windows 7 as a master image. The entire machine is reimaged with Windows 7 - just without you having to sit in front of it while the bits are put on the machine from a standard install DVD. The trick is preserving enough of its user footprint to make it feel like home. Basically, you aren't really keeping XP around, just the hardware it is running on and some copy of the original data. The four automated deployment tools all work with broad similarities. There are also two tools to help you assess whether your PC inventory will be more or less ready to migrate to Windows 7, including a free Systems Management utility from Viewfinity (which can be very useful) and Microsoft's own Upgrade Advisor (which isn't). And who doesn't have a diverse hardware base these days? This is because the four mass migration products require some learning curve and experimentation, particularly if you have a diverse hardware base of PCs that you want to upgrade. The pain threshold is at ten desktops: fewer and you are probably better off using the single PC tools. That didn't inspire confidence, no matter how elegant the original idea behind the product. PC Mover is more reliable - in our tests we had trouble getting a stable machine with Zinstall, where our disk wouldn't boot up after we were finished. PC Mover makes the in-place migration permanent to Windows 7, so you no longer have access to your original XP environment once you are finished. Zinstall is more elegant, preserving your entire XP desktop inside a virtual machine that runs underneath Windows 7, and you have access at the touch of a button. Each of these tools gets around this limitation in a different way, and some work better than others. If you buy a copy of Windows 7, you can do an in-place upgrade - meaning preserving your apps and user settings - from Vista but not from XP. The chart below summarizes the different products and their basic approaches. Prices range from $50 per desktop to enterprise-class appliances for five figures that can handle thousands of PCs. And besides Microsoft's Windows Automation Installation Kit, there are Dell's Kace Kbox 2100, Viewfinity User Migration and Prowess' SmartDeploy, all of which can be used to move dozens or thousands of XP PCs over to Windows 7 and still keep some of the user data and application configuration of the older desktops. The tools include Laplink's PC Mover and Zinstall, both of which are designed for single PC approaches. Microsoft doesn't make it easy to make the move from XP without some pain and suffering, but does have one tool that can automate the process, along with at least five other vendors. If you skipped the big upgrade to Vista you can now consider yourself fortunate that a number of vendors have stepped up to help you migrate your desktops from XP to Windows 7.
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