Vista Upgrades Require Presence of Old OS

kapaopango writes "Ars Technica is reporting that upgrade versions of Windows Vista Home Basic, Premium, and Starter Edition cannot be installed on a PC unless Windows XP or Windows 2000 is already installed. This is a change from previous versions of Windows, which only required a valid license key. This change has the potential to make disaster recovery very tedious. The article says: 'For its part, Microsoft seems to be confident that the Vista repair process should be sufficient to solve any problems with the OS, since otherwise the only option for disaster recovery in the absence of backups would be to wipe a machine, install XP, and then upgrade to Vista. This will certainly make disaster recovery a more irritating experience.'"

Comments

thank u bill

[jazir1979]

the article should say Vista DOWNgrades?

Re:Are you surprised?

[ZG-Rules]

Oh FFS. Your comment would be interesting if you hadn't tacked the "go ubuntu" crap on the end. A simple "use an OS that gives you the freedom to do a complete install, such as any fucking Linux distribution" would suffice. Your particular flavour Linux distro is not interesting. It just makes you a tosser and Linux is wasted on you. (I use most major Linux distributions, that's my Job... but I can make any one replace Windows, not just Ubuntu!!!)

Re:Are you surprised?

[alshithead]

"A simple "use an OS that gives you the freedom to do a complete install, such as any fucking Linux distribution" would suffice"
"It just makes you a tosser and Linux is wasted on you. (I use most major Linux distributions, that's my Job... but I can make any one replace Windows, not just Ubuntu!!!)"

Oh, so because I chose the alternate OS that I personally feel is most user friendly for previously MS bound users I'm a tosser? You fucking narrow minded moron. Should I have suggested Xenix, HP-Unix, or some other mostly esoteric OS? How about this, next time I'll suggest OS2. That would really be productive in getting people to switch from MS, huh? Just because YOU can make any Linux replace Windows doesn't mean the everyday user of Windows can. Someone save us from rectal orifices of tremendous proportions.