Vista Upgrade or Clean Install?

[LateNightLurker]

I just upgraded my laptop with Vista Home Premium and it works great. I chose to do a clean install as I already had backups of all my files. To my surprise the clean install option did not opt to reformat or partition my drive. Instead it backed up my old windows and installed vista on theI current partition.

My question: Would it be preferrable to leave me system as is considering it works fine? Or would you recommend doing the work-a-round where I first reformat and partition, then install vista without a serial, then upgrade with the serial after? Is there really any difference? Would I gain any performance or space on my hd? Currently vista takes up about 10 GB or so but I think that's normal?

Thanks for your opinions/suggestions.

[Aardpsymon]

"If it ain't broke don't fix it" springs straight to mind.

I'd imagine that if you needed disk space you could delete your old windows files.

Especially given microsofts wonderful logic of limited activations, I'd definately say leave it.

[TejasV]

Hi,
I suppose that you have upgraded from win xp....well both win xp and vista use the same file system.
Vista was supposed to to have WINFS but apparently MS decided not to ship it,Longhorn had WINFS.
I think that they will put it up in the next OS..black coomb or black womb..i don't know how to spell it (sorry!)

Regarding the install,as fas as my experience tells me ,do an upgrade.

[RoadClosed]

Alot of blogs recomend the clean install. I did an upgrade and had a little trouble at first but driver updates fixed everything. I did another with a clean install and no problems at all.

[nihil]

Well if you have done it, and it works, I would leave it

I know that with some upgrade routes you are effectively forced to do a clean install, but if you are not, I cannot see the reason for it?

I understand that you cannot format and repartition from within the Vista installer?

[LateNightLurker]

Thanks for the comments. I have a bad habit of breaking what already works well for some reason

Unless I went through the upgrade installation too quickly I did not see the option to reformat and partition. It simply asks if you want to upgrade or do a custom/clean install. When you chose a clean install, it will show your current partition and OS, and that's it. I naturally clicked on the partition assuming the next screen would ask about formatting and making a partition. However, it went straight to installation.

Can you boot from an upgrade disc even? I was under the impression that if you have a OS already installed, your only option with the upgrade is to run it within windows.

Either way I'm still running smoothly so I think I'll stay put (I haven't activated yet just in case). I'm am curious as to why so many blogs (as Roadclosed mentioned too) recommend a clean install as in specific benefits other than possible upgrade woes that I don't have.

[nihil]

Hmmmm,

As I said, I don't think that you can run Format and re-partition from within upgrade. However, I was under the impression that the actual CD contains several versions, and what you can do is determined by your product key?

I think that some of the "advice" that you see on blogs is to do with getting a "cheaper solution" by using upgrade where you are not supposed to, according to the EULA.

You can boot from the disk but if you haven't got a full product key it will be blocked, or, at least MS have tried to block it:

http://support.microsoft.com/default...b/930985/en-us