Microsoft yesterday blamed user confusion for the problems many have encountered trying to move from Vista to Windows 7 after buying a discounted upgrade offered to college students.

"Digital River and Microsoft are aware that some customers from the Windows 7 Academic Store had difficulties completing the download or installation of the product," said a Microsoft support engineer identified as "Michael" in a message posted Sunday to the company's support forum.

Minneapolis, Minn.-based Digital River fulfills download orders for Microsoft's $29.99 Windows 7 upgrade offer to students. Several hundred users have said that they were unable to upgrade from Windows Vista to the new operating system after purchasing, then downloading, a Windows 7 upgrade, from Digital River.

"We are aware that consumers are encountering difficulties installing Windows 7 where the customer is currently running a 32-bit version of Windows such as Windows Vista, but purchased the 64-bit version of Windows 7," Michael said.

Last week, users reported that an error message prevented them from unpacking files downloaded from Digital River. The message read: "We are unable to create or save new files in the folder in which this application was downloaded."

Full story: Computerworld