There are a lot of blog posts and articles out there on the process of installing Vista on a brand new machine. However most people who actually have existing machines that want to move to Vista will likely upgrade rather than reinstall in order to save all their settings and files. In this post, I will go over my experience of upgrading an existing Windows XP machine to Vista RC2.

The machine I am upgrading is a Thinkpad T60 model 2623-D7U restored back to the original factory state. Yes this means all the junk normally installed on a new PC is all there. Not only that, but I installed a couple of other applications just to see how Vista handles software conflicts. My software includes:

  • Firefox 1.5.0.8
  • Office 2007 Beta 2 Technical Refresh
  • Autohotkey
  • foobar2000
  • Activesync
  • Internet Explorer 7

with some of the existing original factory software:

  • Google Desktop
  • Symantec Client Security
  • Sonic DVD Burning
  • Thinkvantage Stuff
  • Diskeeper Lite
  • Verizon Broadband
  • Java 1.4
  • Netwaiting
  • PC-Doctor 5
  • Adobe Reader 7

 

The first thing I did was pop in my RC2 DVD into the drive. Autorun started up immediately and loaded up the setup dialog.

 

If you click the "Check compatibility online" link, it just opens up your browser to this Microsoft site. Nothing special so just click "Install Now".

 

After a few seconds of waiting, I get this dialog to ask if I want to get the latest updates.

 

Once I confirmed the updates, I get the next dialog telling me setup is searching for updates.

 

Of course you have to enter in a key installing anything nowadays.

 

Not to mention agreeing to the EULA.

 

After 5 steps, I'm finally greeted with the meat of the upgrade: easy upgrade or advanced upgrade.

 

Being lazy, I went ahead and let the easy upgrade go. Before upgrading, Vista has to scan for any incompatabilities.

 

Which it does indeed find. The first time, setup told me that the Symantec security client installed is not compatible and that I had to uninstall it before proceeding. After doing that, I had to go through all the previous steps once again to come back to this screen. This time, it provided warnings about incompatibilities, but didn't quit setup.

 

Finally, I arrive at the copy file stage.

 

During this phase, setup will reboot a few times. Up to now, setup has been running on your existing Windows XP operating system. However, once your computer reboots, your computer will now boot into Windows PE setup mode.

Everything after this setup is exactly the same as the fresh installation as I blogged about here.

 

So reactions to my Vista upgrade.

First off, the time it takes to upgrade your operating system is no shorter than a fresh install. In fact I would say it took longer. I have yet to see a 20 minute installation that Vista marketing keeps saying. The only 20 minute setup of an OS that I have seen recently is for Ubuntu.

The setup program for upgrading to Vista versus installing a new Vista OS is nearly identical. The only difference is you don't have a formatting hard drive step. On the other hand, now you have to deal with any incompatabilities that setup might have detected.

Looking at my hard drive after the upgrade, some of the significant folders are gone. For example the notorious Documents and Settings folder is gone from the root. Only a symlink exists there. Instead this folder is now in the new Users folder.

After the upgrade, all of my files and settings were kept intact. Even all the junk applications were still around. The common drivers still worked in Vista except the Sonic Solutions DVD recording driver and the Thinkpad Trackpoint drivers. I don't have a Verizon Broadband account so I wasn't able to test that out. Also if you try to run any of the Thinkvantage software (security, backup, ...) Vista will tell you they are not compatible. Though the fingerprint scan tutorial worked, the fingerprint login was gone.

So now that I've tried the upgrade process with Vista, I still believe a clean install is the way to go for the majority of installations. If you really want to keep your settings around, go for the upgrade. However just remember that the UI for Vista is so different, it won't matter what settings you have in Windows XP. If you are doing an upgrade just because you are too lazy to back up your computer, you are putting a lot of faith that the upgrade won't end in disaster. And finally if you are doing an upgrade because you think your hardware will work better as opposed to a clean install, I can definitely say that is not the case. If the drivers you had for Windows XP works in Vista, you can always install a fresh copy of Vista and install those XP drivers as well. The only advantage of upgrading for this scenario is you don't have to go download the drivers again since they are already installed. 

Therefore, my recommendation is that a clean install of Vista is better than upgrades for the majority of cases. A clean install will not only get rid of all the "junk" on your computer, but it will make sure your new operating system will be performing at its peak without old applications bogging it down.