question about academic upgrade version

T

tsonka

Limp Gawd
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I will be upgrading to 4gig memory soon so that is going to mean the need for a 64bit OS, which will mean an upgrade to Vista.


Through the school system I can get the Academic Upgrade version of Ultimate for $89, I already have the full version of XP.


My question is: If I do a fresh install of XP, then install the Ultimate upgrade, will I have the exact same product that I would get from buying the full version of Ultimate?

I have done a bit of searching and I have gathered that some people talk about short cuts installing the Upgrade without a install of XP then entering keys to make the Upgrade work as normal. I am not interested in shortcuts; I have no problem taking the time to install both programs.


One thing I am concerned about is with XP my 250gig HDD is partitioned into 2 partitions because I could never get gparted to work and I didn’t make a slipstream SP2 disc. If I install my very old XP disc then install Vista will Vista format my HDD to 1 large disc and defeat that old partition barrier?

Also I have had the Academic version of C++ and I know that it was the same software just different license agreement, is there any difference between the Academic and Full versions of operating systems??
 
All the Upgrade version does is check that you already have a copy of Windows (any version) already installed. This means that you can pop the upgrade disk in, restart the computer and then setup will notice your old OS. At this point you can choose to merely upgrade to Vista, or you can format the drive and do a fresh install of Vista (which is probably what you want to do).

What you can't do with an upgrade disk is buy a new drive (or format an old drive clean) and then expect the upgrade disk to allow you to install the operating system.

So no need to format and put a fresh XP installation on just to upgrade, the upgrade disk should allow you to format the XP partition you have now and then just have a fresh Vista installation in its place.

EDIT: no, no difference between academic and normal versions, just different licensing (you're only supposed to activate an academic license twice... I think I've gotten around this just by phoning in to activate though when things go wrong more than twice).
 
Thank you for the reply. One thing I did notice after I posted and was reading the fine print. The Academic version of Ultimate is 32bit only
 
Yeah that's all my school gave me too, I'm not sure if the license key will work with a 64-bit version disk. I went ahead and acquired a 64-bit Ultimate disk but I haven't tried installing it with the 32-bit academic license. After dealing with a Creative Audigy2 driver fiasco in Vista32 I went back to XP. Right now I'm using 64-bit XP from my school and it's working great.
 
What problems did you have with the Audigy 2 and Vista? I'm running 2 machines with Vista32 and Audigy2 ZS without problem, and one with Vista64.
 
Tsonka - just tried it out and the academic license also works with 64bit disks.

maddude0025 said:
What problems did you have with the Audigy 2 and Vista? I'm running 2 machines with Vista32 and Audigy2 ZS without problem, and one with Vista64.
Click to expand...

This driver does not support the following:
  • Decoding of Dolby® Digital and DTS™ signals
  • DVD-Audio
  • DirectSound®-based EAX games
  • Gameports
  • 6.1 speaker mode.
 
Badger said:
Yeah that's all my school gave me too, I'm not sure if the license key will work with a 64-bit version disk. I went ahead and acquired a 64-bit Ultimate disk but I haven't tried installing it with the 32-bit academic license.
Click to expand...
It will work.

Also, what exactly was your Audigy2 problem? Yes, DirectSound is gone, but my Audigy2 ZS worked great in Vista.
 
"What you can't do with an upgrade disk is buy a new drive (or format an old drive clean) and then expect the upgrade disk to allow you to install the operating system."


You can do this...its described in great detail here in the forums

Install, then upgrade that same install
 
my school only offers the license for the vista business upgrade. if i installed ultimate, would i be able to still use the license from my school?
 
So you're talking about installing Vista before you actually have the media in hand?

If you don't enter a product key during the install, Vista will prompt you to choose which version you bought. Thus, you can use an Ultimate disc to install Business. Just make sure you have that key within thirty days though :p
 
LstOfTheBrunnenG said:
It will work.

Also, what exactly was your Audigy2 problem? Yes, DirectSound is gone, but my Audigy2 ZS worked great in Vista.
Click to expand...

Well, no DirectSound is kind of a big deal when you want to play DirectSound games in 5.1. However, I just put on x64 Vista Ultimate last night and had a much better go of installing the daniel_k drivers along with ALchemy for Audigy. I have my 5.1 back in Source games! That was the one thing holding me back from Vista, and now that I had the time to get it working it how it should, I think I'll keep it.
 
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