Why upgrade tools?
Microsoft, in their infinite wisdom, decided to provide an upgrade mechanism to move from Vista to Win7, but NOT from XP to Win7. So if you want to upgrade to Win7 from XP, you need to do a "clean" install which will wipe out your original XP installation. If you have apps that will not run under Win7, the only way to keep using them is to reinstall them under Win7's XP Mode (if you are using the Professional, Ultimate or Enterprise editions) or under another VM (VMWare, VirtualBox, MS Virtual PC 2007). A faster way to do this is to create a virtual machine of the XP system prior to performing the Win7 installation. There are several companies that provide tools to accomplish this including VMWare and Paragon Software.
