xp to 7 upgrade

[topmahof]

a friend of mine had his hard drive crash and wants me to put windows 7 on a new hard drive. so i bought an upgrade windows 7 home premium and i'm going to install it on xp from a restore disc that i have. the restore disc is xp home sp1 which is what his coa is. do i have to put the service packs on and sit through a million updates before i can install 7? or can i put xp on and then put 7 on right away?

[GomJabbar]

You shouldn't need to do any updates to XP, but you may need to activate Windows XP before you can upgrade it to Windows 7 with the Upgrade disk version of Windows 7.

[topmahof]

thanks, good info. appreciate that.

[GomJabbar]

Here is some more info.
http://www.maximumpc.com/article/news/w ... _installed

EDIT: And here is something else...
http://www.winsupersite.com/win7/clean_ ... _media.asp

[topmahof]

thanks for the links, M$ sure doesn't make it easy. i've done the upgrade on 4 of my laptops and i'm going to do it on 2 more. i haven't had any issues with activation and everything worked out okay. it's just on mine i installed 7 on fully updated copies of xp and i didn't really want to sit through installing service packs and a million updates before i could do the upgrade. using the restore xp disc always has given me a preactivated copy of xp on the new hard drive, so activation shouldn't be an issue.