Windows Vista Installation Options
Before installing Vista, and especially before running an upgrade installation, I recommend running the
Vista Upgrade Advisor.
How does Vista install?
Unlike Microsoft's previous Operating Systems (OS), which copied each file over individually, Windows Vista copies an image, or snapshot, of itself to your hard drive and then is modified based on your hardware.
Upgrade Installation
An upgrade installation pretty much copies the new OS over to the computer while saving all of your files. Like the clean install, the upgrade still copies an image over and configures it according to your hardware.
Previous Microsoft Operating Systems let one simply insert a CD from a previous version while performing a clean install from an upgrade CD. This is convenient since your personal files are saved (although you should still backup first), but many power users like to reinstall their OS every year or so, and this will severly limit their ability to do so.
ExtremeTech has an article
here showing the results of their benchmarks on a machine with an upgraded Vista installation and a clean installation. The results were very similar, so there should not be a performance hit when upgrading from Windows XP.
However, there is a workaround for this revealed by Paul Thurrott. Details on this workaround can be found
here.
Clean Installation
I would recommend a clean installation if possible. Please note that a clean installation requires you to reformat your hard drive (or at least part of it) and without a partitioning tool will erase all of your data. The easiest thing to do would be to backup all of your data and perform a clean installation. If you would like to organize your hard drive better your could use a 3rd party partitioning tool to physically organize. If you would like to ask questions about this, please e-mail me or ask on any computer forum and somebody will assist you.
This page was last modified on 07/28/07 02:06 PM