Vista Upgrades Require Presence of Old OS

Posted by kdawson on Sunday January 28, 2007 @01:43PM from the recovery?-disaster dept.

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.'"

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They Had To Discuss This At Microsoft by NeverVotedBush · 2007-01-28 14:42 · Score: 5, Interesting

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.