Fafhrd on 12/6/2010 at 02:00
A simple one. Having just acquired a copy of Windows 7 Professional (would've preferred Ultimate, but $40 for Pro ain't something I can turn away without looking like a jerk) from a new friend what works at Microsoft, and I have Vista Ultimate. A quick Google tells me that the only way to upgrade from Ultimate to Pro essentially requires a clean install, which is fucking lame because that means I'll lose an activation for all my GfWL games, and Chronicles of Riddick. Beyond that, is 7 Pro in any way a step down from Vista Ultimate (other than not having BitLocker, which I don't use anyway)? Or would throwing a 12 gig partition on my terabyte drive and running three versions of Windows side by side be a good idea (though if 7 is as good as people say I might be willing to give up XP)?
Enchantermon on 12/6/2010 at 02:17
Just from looking at Vista Ultimate's prominent features from the Vista comparison chart, it doesn't look like you'll lose anything important, if anything at all. Of course, if you really have the room to throw another partition on there, you could always just install it without activating it and work with it for a while.
Renzatic on 12/6/2010 at 07:22
You'll lose Dreamscenes, Bitlocker, and (I believe) UI language switching. Nothing you'll end up missing, in other words...unless you really like having animated backgrounds and randomly switching the UI from German to French. What I'd suggest doing is keeping XP as a contingency for those few older programs that might not work quite well with 7, and deleting Vista altogether. There's no reason to have both Vista and 7 on the same machine, as far as I'm concerned. You're just wasting space on a redundant OS that could be put to better use elsewhere.
And the GFWL thing, can't you uninstall the games to get your activation back? If not, I guess you could try migrating your folders and registry keys over from Vista to 7 and see if that works. Though that'll probably end up being something easier said that done.
Enchantermon on 14/6/2010 at 00:00
Quote Posted by Renzatic
And the GFWL thing, can't you uninstall the games to get your activation back?
That's true, you should. And if not, you could always call Microsoft and explain the situation. They might help.
