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

Re:OOh

[smash]

Just to add to this... I've upgraded 2 machines from Vista 64 Ultimate to Windows 7 RC (both of them FAR from clean installs - one was 2 years old with a few hundred gig of games and other crap on it, the other was a work machine with a year worth of junk on it) and they both went pretty well. The only thing i had to do was do a repair of VMware workstation, as Windows 7's installer clobbered the network devices.

I figured "why not, I may as well see how it goes" as I'd need to do a reinstall anyway (and all the shit i care about is on a separate disk) if i wanted to do a clean install... but i was pleasantly surprised at how painless the upgrade was. ESPECIALLY considering it was only the RC...

I agree, you'd be dumb to *rely* on an upgrade to work and not be prepared to reinstall, but so far I've been happy with not doing it, using the RC.

But without Internet Explorer...

[Anonymous Coward]

how do I go and download FireFox?

Re:OOh

[_Sharp'r_]

I guess I'm just dumb, then.

I've run the same windows system with just OS upgrades (95-2000-XP Pro), no fresh installs, for about 12 years now. That's around 6-7 MB/CPU/Ram/HD/Video hardware upgrade cycles, since I always build my own and tend to upgrade pieces most of the time. I still have the original Win 95 install files in a sub-directory on my hard drive.

I'm currently running a dual-core with 2 GB of ram and a RAID 1/0 hard drive config (4 drives), so maybe that's it (although hardly unusual in today's market), but my computer seems much faster to me than any other computer I've worked on in the last few years, even brand-new computers with "fresh" installs.

I have 200+ applications installed, many of which are old enough that I'd never find the install media again, if I ever did a fresh install (packed away in some box somewhere, I suppose, since I've moved 4 times in the last 12 years).

Of course, I've also never bought into the idea that the only way to clean up an infected windows box is to reinstall everything from scratch. It takes me about 30 minutes of work to clean up the worst infected windows computer I've ever seen (and I've seen a lot). That's 30 minutes of work for me and about a day or so of work for the computer. Saves the end user a ton of work reinstalling everything, though.

I mean, I know that windows can be stupidly convoluted sometimes compared to unix, but it seems like the "fresh install of windows solves everything" crowd tends to be people who just don't understand what's going on under the hood enough to actually solve the problem they've run into.