Re: OEM and Standard windows - What are the differences?

Tech-Archive recommends: Repair Windows Errors & Optimize Windows Performance

Alias wrote:
"Carey Frisch [MVP]" <cnfrisch@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message news:e7AjyTVWFHA.2124@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Limitations of OEM versions of Windows XP:

-- cannot upgrade over an existing Windows installation. 


Clean installs are better.




Horsepuckey, yourself. Please provide independent technical documentation to support this assertion.

    WinXP is designed to install and upgrade the existing operating
system while simultaneously preserving the applications and data, and
translating as many personalized settings as possible.  The process is
designed to be, and normally is, quite painless.  That said, things
can go wrong, in a small number of cases.

People claiming that a clean installation is always better than an upgrade are living in the past, and might be basing their recommendation on their experiences with older operating systems. one would probably save a lot of time by upgrading the PC to WinXP, rather than performing a clean installation, if there are no hardware or software incompatibilities. Microsoft has greatly improved (over earlier versions of Windows) WinXP's ability to smoothly upgrade an earlier OS.


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