Now you see the problems with upgrading the OS. You get a huge amount of
convenience because you don't have to reinstall your applications. M$
provides Upgrade Advisor to help you clean up your system to help prevent
these problems. That is an impossible task - M$ has no way of knowing
whether any of your current applications have been compromised in WXP in a
way that Vista won't be able to handle. Seems like M$ should have an
inexpensive upgrade path from the upgrade version to the full version for
cases like yours.
But wait -- maybe it is built into your upgrade DVD. You can do a clean
install from your upgrade disk without activating it. Run it and restart it
a few times to verify that it really is working OK for you. Then do an
upgrade install over this non-activated system and activation should work
just fine. Detailed procedure:
http://www.winsupersite.com/showcase...rade_clean.asp
groups.google the microsoft.public.windows.vista.*, and you will find that
Carey and others advise against this procedure because Microsoft is planning
to break activation done in this way, sometime in the future. Microsoft has
plenty of ways to cripple a valid Vista installation any time they want or
don't want, as this past weekend showed.
Using this procedure will at least give you 30 days to run the cleanly
installed unactivated Vista and install all your other applications, and
find out if a clean install might solve your problems. Right now you are
only guessing.
A new OS is always a crap shoot when you are trying to drag along your
legacy stuff.
-Paul Randall
"ThatsIT.net.au" <me@thatsit> wrote in message
news:C6A3B6E0-188D-41DF-92F0-...
>I upgrade my XP to vista with any problem, but I later noticed that few
>programs I had would not uninstall or work. I decide to reinstall. But this
>time I did a clean install from booting up from dvd.
> My problem is that now when I try to activate it tells me I have a upgrade
> copy of Vista and will not allow me to activate.
>
> I could reinstall me XP and then upgrade again but I would rather not. Is
> there any way I can insert my XP disk or enter my XP COA to prove I have a
> copy and let Vista install without reinstalling XP?