With Windows Vista nearing its first release candidate in preparation for a final launch early next year, Microsoft is providing more details about possible upgrade paths. Of note: Windows 2000 cannot be upgraded to Vista. While Windows 2000 Professional customers may purchase a cheaper "upgrade" copy of Microsoft next-generation operating system, Windows Vista must be "clean installed", which means users will need to back up their files and data manually and then copy everything into place. Applications will also need to be re-installed.
To view parent comment, click here.
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
Member since:2005-07-06
Windows NT is alot pickier about hardware faults; systems that may have had Windows 9x installed without a hitch, but BSOD'ed all the time will find that Windows Vista won't install.
Same situation occured with Windows XP; machines that were dodgy, Windows XP simply refused to install of them.
Better to have a picky operating system that'll refuse to install on crap rather than an operating system that installs but crashes all the time.
Member since:2005-07-06
"the 2k3 kernel is essentially the same one as 2000 and XP"
No, It is not the same; One example, the networking stack was moved to the kernel and alot of other tweaks are also there to refuse alot of poorly designed and written hardware/software. Attention to processing is greater to services (daemons) than to applications.
ATI chipsets (RS300 and the like) do not function at all with W00/XP drivers, and if you force it, will make your system constantly rebooting. And many more hardware are not installing with windows server 2003 while could be installed with W00/XP, all discovered by system administrators and me on my own hardware.
I have tested all alpha and beta versions of vista ( around 10) and vista started to change from M5/M6 Milestone, where the kernel/drivers structure changed from XP to WS2003 and thus failed to install on 2 of the testing machines I have.
Member since:
2006-01-02
I don't get it... the 2k3 kernel is essentially the same one as 2000 and XP... They fixed some bugs, but the driver model is exactly the same. The only major thing that changed with Vista was the display driver system.