In a recent article, we kicked around the idea of dropping a Vista upgrade over an existing Windows XP installation. Windows Vista's Setup program—the multitude of code that installs the operating system—doesn't copy files and wriggle the new operating system atop the old one, resulting in a mishmash of both, as was more or less the case with prior Microsoft OSes. Vista's compartmentalized installation routine actually copies an image of Vista onto the hard drive and then plows through things like hardware detection and configuration.

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