To Upgrade or not to Upgrade. That is the question!
Seriously. I'm a big fan of clean installs. This is a laptop for my girfriend's son. A machine that's been sitting around doing nothing for a while. Comes natively with Vista on it. Looked around for XP drivers but HP graciously removed the XP drivers recently and won't dole them out unless I pay for another three years of support on a four year old laptop.
Anyway there's some software out there that won't install on Vista, I believe by virtue of the way it's coded. Rather than screw with it I'd put Win7 on it but the question is of cost. Do I tell her it's $180 for a full version of Win7 or $112 for the upgrade?
Since I'll end up being support for this thing anyway I'm inclined to go with the full version and a clean install. Ultimately my question is: Are upgrades still as messy down the road as they used to be? Are there still potential problems looming in the dark post upgrade?
Seriously. I'm a big fan of clean installs. This is a laptop for my girfriend's son. A machine that's been sitting around doing nothing for a while. Comes natively with Vista on it. Looked around for XP drivers but HP graciously removed the XP drivers recently and won't dole them out unless I pay for another three years of support on a four year old laptop.
Anyway there's some software out there that won't install on Vista, I believe by virtue of the way it's coded. Rather than screw with it I'd put Win7 on it but the question is of cost. Do I tell her it's $180 for a full version of Win7 or $112 for the upgrade?
Since I'll end up being support for this thing anyway I'm inclined to go with the full version and a clean install. Ultimately my question is: Are upgrades still as messy down the road as they used to be? Are there still potential problems looming in the dark post upgrade?