Windows AnyTime Upgrade – Not such a great idea

You may remember me telling you about when I upgraded my Windows Vista Business installation on my desktop PC to Windows Vista Ultimate. I did this using Windows AnyTime Upgrade to save money. The problem is that if I want to reinstall Windows Vista, I can't do a clean installation of Windows Vista Ultimate because the Windows AnyTime Upgrade license will not let you do that. If I had a BitLocker™ ready PC, I would not be able to use BitLocker™ because it requires you clean install Windows Vista Ultimate with two clean hard disk partitions. Also, I have found that Windows Movie Maker will not let me import video, and that that I can't save projects from within Windows DVD maker. I wonder if it's because these were added on (or upgraded in the case of Windows Movie Maker) during the Windows Vista AnyTime Upgrade. Also, because I have to install over the top of Windows Vista Business edition, this will make the total recovery process about ninety minutes to two hours longer. Using up time which I can ill afford. I really hope that Microsoft will sort this problem out because if not I will probably just go ahead and waste the bank's money on a boxed OEM copy of Vista Ultimate using my eight-month old PC as an OEM container.

Don't get me wrong there is no problem with the actual operating system. It's just Microsoft's licenses are too restrictive, I mean we could clean install any upgrade OS. I remember doing it with a version of Windows 98 RTM. I just started setup from the bootdisk and when asked to validate my upgrade, I just inserted my Windows 95 OSR2 disk, and the upgrade took place. It was the same with Microsoft Office for Windows 95, in fact it was even easier because all I had to do was insert Disk 1 from the Microsoft Office 4.2 installation floppy disk set to validate the upgrade, whilst leaving the Office 95 Professional CD in the drive! Why can't we have that in Vista? Please sort it out Microsoft!!!

And that concludes my ranting for this week. Please tune in next week where I will be probably ranting about exams, Bill Gates again or something similar. Just kidding!