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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.'"
Vista will even do the image for you. In the new backup utility included with the OS there is an option for a full system backup. Vista creates a VHD (Microsoft's Virtual Hard Disk format from their virtualization products) file of the entire disk and saves it where you tell it to. It's easy enough to boot up to restore mode and drop that image back on.
I browse on +1 so AC's need not respond, I won't see it.
Somebody made a conscious decision to do it this way. You have to wonder what they were thinking.
"We're Microsoft and we can do as we damn well please because few of our customers know they have options?"
I do wish that more people would move to Linux and/or that Apple would port their OSX to PCs. (which I believe Apple has expressed no or little interest) If Microsoft had more real competition, they wouldn't be so smug and willing to hang their own customers by the short and curlies.
Taking a strict reading of the licence agreement, doesn't this mean that if you have the upgrade version, you can't EVER reinstall it?
To use the upgrade, you need the previous version installed. However, the licence agreement for Vista says:
13. UPGRADES. To use upgrade software, you must first be licensed for the software that is eligible
for the upgrade. Upon upgrade, this agreement takes the place of the agreement for the software
you upgraded from. After you upgrade, you may no longer use the software you upgraded from.
The last part seems to indicate that you are not allowed to reinstall the previous version. Thus, if your hard disk gets trashed, you can't install the previous version in order to do the upgrade.