Vista Upgrade Disc Qualifies you to upgrade to Vista!
Microsoft, in their infinite Wisdom… I'm sorry, did I say Wisdom? I meant Greed. Anyway, in their infinite greed they decided that the Windows Vista Upgrade Disc would no longer accept the CD for a previous Windows version as proof enough to qualify for an upgrade. Windows has to actually be installed on the hard drive in order to qualify.
Apparently, some small group of people who have never owned Windows before and happened to be building their own PCs decided to borrow their neighbor's Windows Installation Disc to "qualify" for the upgrade editions of previous versions of Windows, thus unfairly getting a lower price and cheating Microsoft out of a portion of their profits.
This new requirement is apparently designed to squeeze just a little bit more of that money out of the few people who are doing what I just described in the previous paragraph, but are too lazy to actually install their neighbor's version of Windows on the hard drive before using the Vista Upgrade disc. This had the side effect of forcing anyone who wants to do a clean install of Vista to purchase the full version, even if they already own a previous version of Windows. Of course, Microsoft is all broken up about this.
Unfortunately, Microsoft is working multiple marketing angles, and the "let's make it impossible to do a clean installation of Windows Vista using an upgrade disc" angle had an unforeseen collision with the "let's get them hooked first, then start charging them" angle. Windows Vista permits itself to be installed as a trial version without any license-key — temporarily.
( For those who don't know, doing a "clean" installation means installing Microsoft Windows on a blank hard drive as opposed to upgrading from a version that is already installed which inevitably leaves some of the original files and drivers, sometimes causing problems. )
But temporary is all you need because once Vista is installed you can apparently then run the Vista install/upgrade program again (from inside Vista), type in your license key and opt to do a clean installation. — Special thanks to DailyTech.com for this fascinating Vista Trivia.
You read that correctly, you can use the upgrade disc to temporarily install Vista on a blank hard drive without a license, and then you can run the install program again and use the installed version of Vista to qualify for the upgrade.
Which means that Microsoft, in seeking to increase revenue by squeezing every penny out of people who were cutting corners, has inadvertantly released an upgrade edition that can be used to qualify itself for an upgrade to itself — so anyone who knows this little trick wouldn't have to buy the "full" (non-upgrade) version of Windows Vista in order to perform a clean installation — they wouldn't even need to own a copy of a previous version of Windows.
Of course, I don't recommend anyone do this. It is in violation of Microsoft's licensing agreement and therefore not legal, however it is ironic that in it's greed to pinch every possible penny from people playing with loopholes that Microsoft themselves created the biggest loophole yet. Some might say it's Karma.
- one
