This has been bugging me for a while, but I am not gonna start going off until I am absolutley positive that I am 100% correct here.
I have heard in countless threads people putting pressure on other people to make sure that they buy the full install version of Windows XP and not the upgrade. The full version costs over 100 dollars more, but that is not the thing that bugs me about this advice. The thing that bugs me is that the full install version IS on the upgrade disc so its a huge waste of money!
You can format your hard drive and install a fresh copy of XP off of the upgrade disc. All you need to do is put ANY version of Windows in the CD drive when it prompts you to and it will do a totally fresh install of XP on your computer. You dont even really need to do that because it will ask you if you want to upgrade or do a clean install after it detects an old version of windows on your HDD. If you choose clean it will format then install. This will work with both Home and Pro versions even though the Home version says that you cant upgrade over 2K it WILL let you if you boot off the CD. For those that are curious, this has been the case with ALL windows “upgrades” that have been released since Win 95.
I am sure that this all works because I have loaded and reloaded an upgrade version of Home XP on my system about 10 times since release and have formatted the HDD each time before install. I have used my Win 2K disc as the check disk so it would upgrade as well.
Is there some hidden difference between the full and “upgrade” versions that I don’t know about? Or is it the total waste of cash that I think it is?
Not everyone owns a previous version of Windows. Although it’s quite hard to buy a prebuilt PC without Windows (thanks to MS’s dirty tricks), if you buy parts and assemble your own computer, you won’t have an OS to upgrade from. Sure, you could borrow one from a friend, but that’s technically illegal.
I think that point is pretty much understood. If you are not upgrading to XP then that means you do not have an old version of Windows lying around. But I have read countless times on this and other boards that people suggest that you should not purchase the upgrade but that you should purchase the full install because it is bad to upgrade your OS. Always do a clean install.
My question is why purchase the full install to upgrade to XP when you can just buy the upgrade and still accomplish a totally clean install?
Just about all the previous versions of windows I have are upgrades. I wonder if they would
qualify as ownership? I have Xp upgrade too, never put it on though.
Handy, yes you can upgrade from an upgrade. But it only goes back so far. Windows 3.1 isn’t valid for the XP upgrade, and I’m not even sure that Windows 95 is.
Mostly, because they don’t know any better. I’d bet that the majority of computer end users these days are not geeks or even computer literate. They don’t know that the upgrade is the full version and/or they don’t know how to defeat the simple checks that keep them from installing the upgrade as a full version.
However, it is possible for vendors to offer software that will not install unless you are running the “full” version and thereby force you to shell out the extra bucks. Didn’t MS do this with their win95 Plus software? It wasn’t foolproof but it can be done.
The other answer is that MS probably makes most of their money off corporate accounts who always buy the full version.
Thing is, if you have upgraded from w95 with an upgrade cd, then upgrade to w98 with an upgrade cd
then upgrade to XP with an upgrade cd,
you would have to do all that again if it won’t accept the upgrade cds as proof.sigh