Vista Upgrades Require Presence of Old OS

URL: http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/83200774/article.pl

kapaopango writes "Ars Technica is reporting that upgrade versions of
Windows Vista Home Basic, Premium, and Starter Edition cannot be
installed on a PC unless Windows XP or Windows 2000 is already
installed. This is a change from previous versions of Windows, which
only required a valid license key. This change has the potential to
make disaster recovery very tedious. The article says: 'For its part,
Microsoft seems to be confident that the Vista repair process should be
sufficient to solve any problems with the OS, since otherwise the only
option for disaster recovery in the absence of backups would be to wipe
a machine, install XP, and then upgrade to Vista. This will certainly
make disaster recovery a more irritating experience.'"