Upgrade from Home Basic to Home Premium question.

[Guest]

Hello. I have a new eMachines computer that I bought a few months ago. It
was a floor model and did not come with a disc but I made a "restore" DVD.
The Windows Vista Home Basic on it is legit. I bought 1 gig of RAM to add to
the PC the day I bought it so I have 1.5 gig of RAM.

Since I have enough RAM I'd like to upgrade to the Home Premium version of
Vista, I like the Aero look and feel (though the non-Aero Vist is still very
spiffy!).

I qualify for academic pricing, therefore the "Home Premium" upgrade is less
expensive to me than the "Anytime Upgrade" since I need to buy the "Anytime
Upgrade" disc.

Can the "Home Premium" academic version upgrade a "Home Basic" installation?

 

[Marc]

There are 2 types of upgrades you can do with Vista, Windows Anytime Upgrade
and the other is an In-Place (from a full version or upgrade Package)
Upgrade. I not sure what you mean when you say "Can the "Home Premium"
academic version upgrade a "Home Basic" installation?"



The other issue you have is Aero. Aero requires a Video card that is capable
of handling DirectX 9 or higher and a minimum of 128MB of Graphic Memory
(Shared or Dedicated) and has a WDDM Driver (Windows Display Driver Model)
it a driver written for Vista. Most new Graphic cards are able to handles
this.

 

[Guest]

My understanding is that the "In-Place" upgrade would be what I would want to
do in my case.

However, when reading the "Who Can Upgrade" documentation on Microsoft's web
site regarding "Vista Home Premium", it only mentions Windows XP users as
being eligible for the Home Premium upgrade. It does not mention Vista Home
Basic users. I wonder if an "Upgrade" will work?

I do not expect video to be a problem. I have an ATI Radeon X300 SE PCIE
card with 128 mb RAM. The motherboard on-board Intel 950 gave me a better
Aero readiness score!

The reasons that this eMachine came with Home Basic were twofold (1) it only
had 512MB RAM; I bought a gig RAM with the machine and installed it before
even booting. (2) save licensing costs for a low-cost PC. However, since
I'm a student my licensing costs are low!

Thanks for reading!
-Phil

 

[Marc]

In-Place Upgrade are usually done by large organizations, as for your
options, I would recommend the windows Anytime Upgrade as the In Place would
take time and you need to buy the full version,

You should not have any issue with your Video card as it does meet all
requirements for Aero.