With all of the new features of Windows Vista, there’ll be a mighty temptation for you to buy a copy of the operating system in a store and immediately install it over your existing instance of Windows XP, 2000, Me, or 98. Before you do, you should consider some of the following cautions: _ Your old PC may not be up to the challenge of running Vista. You may need substantial investments in additional RAM, a more capable video card, a larger hard drive, or all of the above to get adequate performance from Vista. _ Some of your hardware, such as printers and networking adapters, may not work at all after you install Vista—unless you update the drivers they need to versions that are Vista-compatible. _ Even if you find that one or more of your drivers needs to be updated, the vendor of your hardware may not make a Vista-compatible version available for months, years, or ever. (It’s happened before with previous versions of Windows.)

Avoid Installing Vista over Another Version of Windows

We do recommend that you get Windows Vista preinstalled when you’re buying a new PC. But you may be surprised to learn that we don’t recommend that you install Vista over XP or an older version of Windows. The reason is that installing Vista on top of another version of Windows may cause incompatibility problems that you might not be able to easily fix. When you buy a PC with Vista preinstalled, it’s almost certain that the components in the PC will have been selected for their compatibility and will have the latest driver software. If you install Vista to an older machine yourself, however, you may find that your printer, networking adapter, or some other vital component no longer works because the version you have of its driver is incompatible. In general, you shouldn’t consider installing Vista over an older version of Windows unless the following conditions are true:

• You need a feature of Vista that you can’t add to XP; or

• You need an application that requires Vista; and

• You can’t afford even the least expensive new PC that comes with Vista preinstalled Even if one of the above cases is true, you may be better off burning your old data to a CD, formatting the old PC’s hard drive, and doing a clean install of Vista.

This avoids the possibility that some components of the old OS will hang around to cause conflicts. If you’ve never before backed up and formatted a hard drive, however, don’t try to learn how on any PC that’s important to you.

XP Users Can Try the Vista Upgrade Advisor

To help you determine whether a particular PC has the performance characteristics and the current hardware drivers it needs to work well with Vista, Microsoft provides the Vista Upgrade Advisor. We recommend that you run the Upgrade Advisor on your current, non-Vista PC, if only to be humbled when you see the many aspects of your system that may need you to shell out some bucks for complete Vista compatibility. Even if you never install Vista on an older PC, you may find that upgraded drivers are available that will give you better performance on your current system.

The Upgrade Advisor is a short and simple test that you access on Microsoft’s web site. It runs only on PCs that have Windows XP installed. As Microsoft states on the site, “In general, PCs purchased within the last two years have a better chance of being able to run Windows Vista as-is or with affordable improvements to the system hardware.” That leaves out a lot of PCs that were built when Windows 2000, Me, or 98 were the leading operating systems. Visit Microsoft’s ‘Get Ready’ Web page. At the time of this writing, the Vista Upgrade Advisor was available from Microsoft at. That page also has useful information about the exact hardware requirements for Vista. This includes a description of Windows Vista Capable PCs (which can run all Vista applications) and Windows Vista Premium Ready PCs (which can also run the slick Aero user interface).