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Maflynn · Jun 29, 2009, 07:36 AM

Any thoughts on the upgrade version over the full version. Amazon has the upgrade heavily discounted and I am tempted but I suppose OSX has me spoiled in this that the discs are bootable. I prefer getting a full OS and not needing to worry about holding on to old discs.

Also I'm leaning towards the home version but the pro version has the ability to run XP programs that don't run on Vista (or win7) but you can run it via vitualization. This sounds kind of cool and it appears you can download virtualpc from microsoft to do this (only if you have the purchased the pro version). I'm not sure if its a crippled version or not.

Thoughts/comments.

ghporter · Jun 29, 2009, 08:28 AM

In general (and based solely on past practice), Microsoft only adds a check for an existing MS operating system to "upgrade" discs. They don't "only provide the differences" in these discs, and in fact it would be pretty difficult to do with Win7 since it can be installed over just about any OS including (I think) Windows 95. So that's a TON of older OSs that they'd have to provide difference profiles for, right?

Basically, a "true Microsoft upgrade package" is the entire OS along with installer code that looks for a signature on the hard drive indicating that there is a prior MS OS installed.

I'd go with the Pro version. In my experience with XP Home vs. Pro, the limitations (stupid ones!) of the Home version make it a poor choice for anyone with more than one computer.

Maflynn · Jun 29, 2009, 08:34 AM

I thought they changed that in vista, in so far that you wanted to put the OS out on a clean partition you couldn't do that because there was no prior OS (and no ability to check for the disks). I could be wrong but people were complaining about upgrades vs. full versions.

ghporter · Jun 29, 2009, 04:35 PM

I think we're talking about the same sort of limit. Here's how it works in XP; you say "install on C" and the installer looks on C for an existing copy of a Windows OS; not finding it on a clean partition causes the install to fail for that partition. I recall seeing all sorts of dodges for this situation, mostly based on what sort of "signature" the installer looked for.

One method that doesn't seem to depend on a dodge is detailed on this Michael Stevens Tech page under "Steps to Clean Install XP" (about half way down the page). It's a little more involved than just popping in a disc and answering a bunch of questions, but it is still pretty straightforward.

With all that said, it looks like vLite (by the author of nLite) is the answer to this issue. I've found several sources that state the tool will produce a bootable Vista disc from which you can install the complete OS. Having a bootable source disc for your Windows OS is a very important thing anyway, so I'd do this in any case.

shifuimam · Jul 1, 2009, 09:10 AM

I don't know what version of VirtualPC you can get with the more expensive editions of Windows 7, but VirtualPC 2004 is free from Microsoft. I'm guessing that what you're getting with the cost of Windows is the XP system files to run a separate virtualized environment for XP applications (much like running Classic in OS X).

Get the Pro version - it's only $50 more; you won't regret it.

Maflynn · Jul 1, 2009, 11:41 AM

I'm going to wait and see what the price of the OEM versions of win7 will be. Right now newegg only seems to have vista (but I can get a free upgrade to win7). I hate having to hold onto old disks just to reinstall an OS, invariably they'll get lost and I'll have great difficulty trying to run the upgrade then.