I have a fairly new computer running XP media center edition. I will be
getting my free upgrade to Vista Home Premium in a few weeks. Will I have to
do a clean install or not? I'd like to know if I should continue the tedious
task of installing my old programs and settings (I know the data is not a
problem).
Depends. Short answer:no, you probably don't need to do a clean
install.
If you do a so-called "clean" install you in effect start over. That
means you'll need to reinstall ALL your software. For me, that would
have been a unacceptable pain in the butt and take over a week of
tedious work. However doing a clean install, if you're not careful,
you can lose some or all of your data as well. Many less experienced
users learn this painful lesson the hard way and also lose some of
their irreplaceable one of a kind data in the process if they don't
move it off the drive they are clean installing to and don't have good
backup.
While many "experts' will tell you the only "right" way to install a
new operating system is via the clean install method I disagree and
find that often such advice is just a simplistic response that betrays
the expert as having less expertise then he pretends.
A install in place simply overwrites your existing operating system
replacing it with the new one while keeping your settings and already
installed software and devices. I just did this type of upgrade and
had no problem (in second attempt) and I've got a very large and
complex setup spanning nearly 2 TB of files. So it can be done.
There is one big downside to this method. If XP was unstable and/or
there are loads of bogus or any type of Registry errors, orphaned
lines and other such things which likely most users are totally
unaware of, then you will carry many of these over to Vista. If these
caused problems for XP, or just added to the bloat, likely these kind
of errors will crop up again once Vista is installed sooner or later.
So it becomes a balancing act. What is your tolerence for having to
perhaps spend days reinstalling all your software or your tolerance
for finding and more importantly FIXING any errors caused by
overwriting one OS with another? There is no one answer fits all.
So far for me, Vista in several days of running has presented several
annoying, and yes STUPID issues. None yet have crashed Vista to the
extend it didn't repair itself, but if you get a Registry hive
corrupted error (I did) that makes you wonder just how stable Vista
really is. Only time will tell. Such issues likely would have happened
reagardless if I had done a clean install or not.
