I was going to upgrade from Windows XP to Vista, keeping all my software and files intact but at the last minute I decided I would do a clean installation by formatting my hard drive and installing Vista from scratch.

I had to upgrade my RAM and video card to work with Vista and I figured I would rather not run into any problems because of too many things changing at once.

If your computer is Vista-ready, I wouldn't hesitate to upgrade from XP but if you're upgrading your computer as well as Windows, there are just too many possibilities for problems for my liking.

Deciding to do a clean install presented my first hurdle. I bought the upgrade version of Vista because the wording on the box sounded like it could be installed from scratch as well as upgrading from XP.

According to the box:

For users running Microsoft Windows 2000 Professional, Windows XP or Windows Vista only. Backup and clean install may be required.

That led me to believe a clean install was possible (and with past versions of Windows it was, as long as you had an original CD from the previous version to verify you own it), but it turns out you can only install the upgrade if you have a previous version of Windows on your computer.

So, I wound up reinstalling XP and then upgrading it to Vista. So the installation basically took me twice as long as it would have if I'd had a full version.

The actual Vista installation went smoothly, however, once the upgrade could be started. It asked far fewer questions than any previous version I've installed, and the total time to install was about 45 minutes.

The only problem I had was that it wasn't able to connect to the internet to download any updates during the installation. This turned out to be because Vista didn't recognize the network card in my computer automatically.

After the installation was done, I loaded the driver for the network card (the Windows XP driver worked just fine) and everything was up and running.

There were several updates already released on the day Windows Vista was released so make sure you run the update as part of the installation (Vista will ask if it can do this when you install it) or right after it finishes.

One other thing I'll note is regarding the license agreement. I'm not usually one to read through these long legal agreements that you generally have to agree to when installing any new software, but I was curious to see if there was anything that I really didn't agree with so I spent the time to read it all.

Nothing jumped out at me that I wouldn't have agreed to, but one restriction did catch my eye.

When you agree to the license terms, one of them is that if you're upgrading you can't continue to use the old version of Windows once Vista is installed. So you can't load your copy of XP on an older computer, for example.

This may have been in past versions as well but this is the first time I've ever noticed the restriction. Keep this in mind if you're like me and have older computers that have been passed down to children or other family members.