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The Windows Vista Clean Installation Process

With Windows Vista, Microsoft has dramatically changed the installation process. No longer will you spend your time looking at a boring blue ASCII screen and entering commands by keyboard—the Vista installer has a full graphical interface, making it easy to partition drives and install your operating system. You already saw some of this process back in Chapter 12, “Implementing Hard Drives,” but this chapter will go into a bit more detail.

Just as when installing Windows 2000 or XP, you need to boot your computer from some sort of Windows installation media. Usually, you’ll use a DVD disc, though you can also install Vista from a USB drive, over a network, or even off of several CD-ROMs that you have to specially order from Microsoft. When you’ve booted into the installer, the first screen you see asks you to set your language, time/currency, and keyboard settings, as in Figure 14-14.

Figure 14-13 Windows XP desktop with Bliss background

Figure 14-14 Windows Vista language settings screen

The next screen in the installation process is somewhat akin to the 2000 and XP Welcome screen, in that it enables techs to start the installation disc’s repair tools (Figure 14-15). Just like the completely revamped installer, the Vista repair tools are markedly different from the ones for Microsoft’s previous operating systems. You’ll learn more about those tools in Chapter 17, “Maintaining and Troubleshooting Windows,” but for now all you need to know is that you click where it says Repair your computer to use the repair tools. Because you’re just installing Windows in this chapter, click Install now.

Figure 14-15 The Windows Vista setup Welcome screen

The next screen shows just how wildly different the Vista installation order is. When installing Vista, you enter your product key before you do anything else, as you can see in Figure 14-16. With Windows 2000 and XP, this didn’t come until much, much later in the process, and there’s a very interesting reason for this change.

Microsoft has dramatically altered the method they use to distribute different editions of their operating system; instead of having different discs for each edition of Windows Vista, every Vista installation disc contains all of the available editions. In Windows 2000 and XP, your product key did very little besides let the installation disc know that you had legitimately purchased the OS. In Vista, your product key not only verifies the legitimacy of your purchase; it also tells the installer which edition you purchased, which, when you think about it, is a lot to ask of a randomly generated string of numbers and letters.

Figure 14-16 The Windows Vista product key screen

If you leave the product key blank and click the Next button, you will be taken to a screen asking you which version of Vista you would like to install (Figure 14-17). Lest you start to think that you’ve discovered a way to install Vista without paying for it, you should know that doing this simply installs a 30-day trial of the operating system. After 30 days, you will no longer be able to boot to the desktop without entering a valid product key that matches the edition of Vista you installed.

After the product key screen (and in Figure 14-18), you’ll find Microsoft’s new and improved EULA, which you can skip unless you’re interested to see what’s changed in the world of obtuse legalese since the release of Windows XP.

On the next page, you get to decide whether you’d like to do an upgrade installation or a clean installation (Figure 14-19). As you learned earlier, you have to begin the Vista installation process from within an older OS to use the Upgrade option, so this option will be dimmed for you if you’ve booted off of the installation disc. To do a clean installation of Vista, edit your partitions, and just generally install the OS like a pro, you choose the Custom (advanced) option.

You may remember the next screen (Figure 14-20) from Chapter 12,