If you migrated to Windows Vista Home Basic, you were, no doubt, disappointed to learn that there’s no easy upgrade path from Windows Vista Home Basic to Windows 7. You may think that there’s not much you can do, other than bite the bullet and re-install Windows 7 on top of your existing copy of Windows Vista Home Basic.

Second Upgrade Option For Windows Vista Home Basic

That’s actually one of two things you can do, if you’re intent on getting Windows 7 onto your computer. While it’s true that there is no upgrade path for Windows Vista Home Basic to Windows 7, there is an upgrade path from Windows Vista Home Basic to Windows Vista Home Premium, and if you purchase that upgrade now, you will get a free upgrade to Windows 7 when it is released on October 22.

What does that get you? It means that you’ll get to keep the Vista hardware drivers you have loaded on your computer right now. That may not seem like a big bonus, but it could turn out to be, if Windows 7 doesn’t have the driver(s) you need. You may spend significant amounts of time locating, re-installing and troubleshooting drivers if you install Windows 7 on top of your existing Windows Vista Home Basic installation.

If you decided to take advantage of Microsoft’s sale on Windows 7 earlier this month, the upgrade to Vista Home Premium will mean that you’ll have shelled out about $240 to get to Windows 7 from where you are. A new copy of Windows 7, which assumes a fresh install, is expected to hit the shelves at $199. If you passed on the sale, the $183 upgrade price to Windows Vista Home Premium with a free Windows 7 upgrade will save you about $16 over buying new.

The free upgrade to Windows 7 from Windows-Vista-Home-Basic-turned Vista-Home-Premium will only last until January 2010, so you’ll have to think about this and come to a decision quickly. After January, Windows Vista Home Basic users will need to pay to upgrade to Windows Vista Home Premium, and then pay again to upgrade to Windows 7 in order to keep their stuff intact.

That’s bound to downgrade a few users to “unhappy” status. The other, less costly alternative at that point is to bite the bullet, upgrade to Windows 7 with a clean installation and re-install your applications and drivers. Driver Detective can also locate and install drivers to replace those that are missing, corrupted or incorrect.

Photo Credit: Photo Courtesy of Microsoft