Upgrading Vista Home to Business

[Guest]

How painless is the process of upgrading a Vista Home machine to Vista
Business? Most of the walkin office supply stores sell notebooks with a Home
version, but i need Business due to the remote desktop functionality. Any
issues doing this?

 

[LaRoux]

Yes, there isn't the ability to "upgrade" from home to Business.

However, you can upgrade from home Basic or Premium to Ultimate which
includes the features of Business.

 

[Andre Da Costa[ActiveWin]]

Who says? Vista Business is a superset of Vista Home Basic, of course you
upgrade to it from Business.

 

[Fox]

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/932616

This lists all versions that can be upgraded, and to what

 

[BrianW]

The big caveat, if you are planning to use the computer for a while, setting
things up with the idea of upgrading later, is, no, you cannot "upgrade"
from Home Premium to Business, preserving your settings, etc.
You can upgrade from Home Premium to Ultimate, (which is a superset of Home
Premium and Business.)
And, you can upgrade from Home Basic to Home Premium, Business or Ultimate.

"Upgrade" in this case means the ability to do an upgrade installation
preserving all settings, etc., and is not about eligibility for upgrade
pricing. You can pretty much always do a custom (clean) installation, using
an upgrade installation key, no matter which version you started with,
though an upgrade installation key means you have to start out the
installation in a running Windows system.

Home Premium has features not in Business (mostly Media Center stuff) and
vice versa (mostly network stuff), thus the obstacle to upgrade
installations.

 

[Guest]

Just 'over-written' Home Premium with Business! The process creates a backup
of the previous Windows. I liked the Media Centre stuff (lost that now) so I
guess my only route to combine both is Ultimate! Hopefully, this will
maintain everything I have now achieved using the Business Vista install.