Windows 7 Clean Install Only In Europe

jbeale53 writes "It seems that to install Windows 7 in Europe, you'll have to wipe the system and start over. There will be no ability to upgrade. From the article, 'The unfortunate side effect has been caused by Microsoft's decision to avoid any further EU censure on Windows 7 by removing Internet Explorer 8 from the OS. Because Internet Explorer is so deeply integrated within Vista, it's not currently possible to perform an upgrade that removes IE.' Why would Microsoft cripple it this way? Just to try and point fingers at the European Union? Because the EU didn't tell them to remove IE, they only told them to offer other browsers to be installed during setup."

Comments

OOh

[symbolset]

As much as I would like to find fault with Microsoft here...

Anybody that "upgrades" a Windows operating system in place from one version to another is an idiot.

People should reinstall their Windows from scratch at least once a year. Any less frequent than that and the successive patches to patches to patches become too much for the system to bear. The successive software installs and uninstalls leave hanging dependencies that slow the system to even worse of a crawl than it was at first install. An "upgraded" system drags with it the legacy rootkits previously installed, and those cause issues even in the best case. In the worst case the malware and crudware bog down the system so much you're lucky to get any work done at all.

A fresh install of XP on modern equipment is almost as snappy as Linux. After a year you're powering up and going for coffee while it "wakes up". After an "OS Upgrade" you don't dare power the thing off unless you're going on vacation for a week. Patch Tuesday has spawned "Team Building Wednesday".

Re:OOh

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

The only problem with this once-good advice is that in a world of DRM-restricted ****, a complete wipe and reinstall of your system almost guarantees you'll lose something, even if you think you've backed everything up.

I suppose this is what we get for using an operating system that doesn't clearly distinguish between data that can change (real or configuration metadata) vs. fixed code/data for the OS and applications that changes only if and when you install a different version. It's also what we get for using an OS that lets applications mess with things like your boot sector to implement DRM (I'm looking at you, Adobe) and provides separate storage for configuration that isn't in the main file system at all (registry), so there are all sorts of places for vital information to hide and avoid being backed up in the first place or easy to restore even if it is saved.

Unfortunately, until Microsoft grow up on this front or someone writes software as powerful as Creative Suite to run on Linux, this is the world many of us are stuck in. :-(

Re:OOh

[Falconhell]

Whilst I agree that upgrading the OS is a bad idea the suggestion that one needs to reinstall every year is just plain wrong. I have 200 systems that have been running the same image for 5 years with no slowdowns or problems. You must be doing something wrong.

Oh and creating a ghost image of your fresh install is a much better option than reinstalling
timewise. I have not needed to install for years.
Having the patches to make XP loaded drive boot in any machine you like helps.

Re:OOh

[Kufat]

Anecdotal, but...
My PC is an Athlon 64 3200+ running XP SP3. Before that, it was an Athlon XP 1800+, and a PII/450 before that. I upgraded from a botched Win98 install on the PII to XP RC1(!), and haven't done a clean install since. (I've done repair installs with each CPU/mobo upgrade.) My PC has always been as snappy and responsive as I could hope for; the only problem is an occasional machine check exception which may be due to hardware. (Diagnostics say that the error occurs on HyperTransport 0, which connects the CPU core to its on-chip memory controller.)
Maybe the stability is due in part to avoiding crap and bloatware; I use FF, Thunderbird, and Pidgin, and disable most unnecessary services and the startup apps that some programs try to install. I also do clean uninstalls when I remove programs and generally try to trim the fat.

However, I do see less experienced users' PCs running slowly and unreliably...sometimes it's a clearly defined spyware problem and sometimes it's "Windows bloeat" or whatever you'd like to call it. I can't say what they do differently because I'm not looking over their shoulders.

Re:OOh

[superdave80]

"So you can save 5 minutes backing up your stuff?"

Hell, I don't even worry about that anymore. Partition for Windows on C:, partition for all my data on D:. C: gets wiped, D: remains untouched.

Re:OOh

[Malc]

When you're comparing it to Linux, you're comparing it to a version of Linux from 2002, right? That's when XP with no updates is from.

Re:OOh

[robinesque]

I think your definition of 'just works' is very different from Joe PC's definition of 'just works'.

Re:OOh

[myxiplx]

You've never come across some of the viruses I've seen then. Ever seen one that still loads, even in Safe Mode? How about the one that disables system restore, regedit, task manager, msconfig, *and* still ran in safe mode? That little bugger could lock down the computer better than most IT admins I know.

Thankfully it was only a single process virus. The ones that run as a linked set of 3 (randomly named) processes are the worst. You can't kill any process individually, you have to get all three at the same time, before they can re-launch each other.

The last time I attempted to clean a PC was a year ago, it took 6 hours to get all the viruses. There were at least 6 strains on there, three of which weren't identified by any virus scan (neither Sophos, Symantec nor AVG found them), and were subsequently identified by Sophos as being new.

It was pure luck that I spotted the one that still ran in Safe Mode, and it was an absolute swine to remove, even with all the tools and experience I have at my disposal (and I've been manually removing viruses for 6+ years).

I would never try to manually clean a system these days, there is no way to guarantee you found everything, and there are too many 'stealth' viruses out there that infect small numbers of computers in an attempt to fly under the AV companies radar, and with the viruses that sit and harvest bank details, the risk is just too great.

These days I would always advise to backup your data, wipe, and re-install. It's the only way to be sure.

Re:OOh

[Bert64]

I have installed Ubuntu on a bunch of machines lately, and on all of them it worked straight out of the box with no tweaking required...

2 Dell laptops, a C610 and (i believe) a D800
An eee 901
A custom built box with an asus motherboard and quad core cpu
A fujitsu lifebook e-series (old, p3/700)
An HP workstation, not sure of the model
An older custom built box with a single core amd64

It supported wireless out of the box on those machines that had wireless, and it came with a set of apps ready to run... On the machine which used proprietary graphics drivers, it told me i needed them and i just had to confirm i wanted to install them.

A windows install is a lot more hassle, if the machine is especially new it wont have drivers and you might be forced to load them manually... I have seen lots of windows installs running with generic vesa graphics (ie extremely slowly) because people didnt realize they had to install proper video drivers.

And once you have got windows and all its various drivers installed, you still have a pretty useless system that can't do very much until you install some applications (which you have to do manually).

Re:Same old crap

[man_of_mr_e]

The problem was, you could still access the internet via explorer, just by typing a URL in any windows explorer window. Further, deleting iexplore.exe means you couldn't get updates. I'd call that a big repercussion.

The point was not that Microsoft couldn't create a version of Windows without a browser, obviously they could. They couldn't simply remove it instantly without basically creating a system that was non-functional.

The judge gave them 30 days to remove IE. Not enough time to re-engineer the OS without the browser in a way that wouldn't break things.

XP 2001 vs Linux 2009?

[ScottCooperDotNet]

Comparing the original XP release without Service Packs (circa 2001) to a much newer Linux install (2009) is a cheap argument. Next you'll tell us that nVidia's GeForce 256 is trash next to an ATI Radeon HD 4000.

An XP CD with SP3 slipstreamed is slightly faster than earlier versions, if reports are to be believed. If you manage to make an XP system as slow as Vista on the same hardware you're doing something wrong.

"Only" told them to bundle other browsers?

[Stan Vassilev]

Because the EU didn't tell them to remove IE, they only told them to offer other browsers to be installed during setup.

Saying "only" doesn't make that statement any less absurd. How is the selection for these browsers to be made? Because you know the moment Microsoft announces they're to put "select few" browsers in Windows 7, everyone will want theirs in.

Opera says "top 5" browsers, but picking browsers by market share, in order to promote less popular competitors results in a bitter irony. Not to mention the magical number "5" comes from Opera being 5-th in desktop browser market share. If it was "top 3" they wouldn't even be in that list, depriving them of the purpose of their own lawsuit. Have you seen what YouTube says to IE6 users? Please upgrade to a modern browser: Chrome, IE8, Firefox. Opera's nowhere in that list. Should they sue YouTube?

What the EU commission wants from Microsoft is a solution that can't be carried out in any sensible manner. But maybe that's exactly what they want, have you seen what EU charges Microsoft for failing to abide? To paraphrase another euphemism, let's call it "surprise tax" ;)

Removing IE

[Phroggy]

Alright, here's where I'm confused:

In Windows Vista, you cannot remove IE. You can upgrade from 7 to 8, of course, but there's no way to remove it, and things will break if you try, because it was never designed to operate without IE present, although it's certainly better than XP was in that respect.

In Windows 7, you can remove IE. Control Panel, Programs and Features, click the link in the sidebar to "Turn Windows features on or off", uncheck Internet Explorer 8, click Yes to the warning that this might break stuff, let it reboot, wait a few extra seconds while it "configures" things, and it's gone. The rendering engine is still there, of course, but the application is gone.

Presumably, after you have upgraded from Vista to 7, this is still true; you can still remove IE by following the above steps.

So how hard is it to just automatically add the uninstall to the upgrade process? Make it optional: after completing an upgrade, ask the user whether they'd like to remove IE or keep it.

And hey, if I recall correctly, they were planning to offer two versions anyway: you could either have IE preinstalled, or not. So, they could make the no-IE version clean-install-only, and the with-IE version could be clean-install or upgrade.

This is definitely not a technical problem.