Installation and Upgrade Considerations

Clean install or In-place Upgrade

Clean Install

Means to install the Operating system to a new computer or completely replacing the Operating system software on the old one by repartitioning and reformatting the taget disk. Any existing user data or settings are deleted ruing the setup process.

In-Place Upgrade

Means running setup from an existing version of the Operating System (OS) so that third-party applicatoins, user settings, and data filesa re all kept and made avaialble in the new version.

Upgrade Considerations

Hardware Compatability

You must ensure that the Operating System upgrade or installation can utalize the components and resources provided via the components as hardware. For example, installing a 32-bit Operating system (OS) or upgrade onto a 32-bit architecture will not work.

Application and Driver Compatability

Certain applications may no longer function correctly if you are migrating hardware from a 64-bit architecture, or different processor architectures such as ARM, Intel, or AMD

Backup Files and user preferences

Before doing any soft of large migration to a new major version of software, be it an Operating System upgrade/downgrade or to a newwer version of an application it is important to create backups to a seperate disk or onto a cloud storage device that can be retreived if ncessary to restore old files that may become lost, corrupted, or if the system completely fails to install and leaves behind a broken application or system.

Third-Party Drivers

Some drivers may fail to continue to function after an upgrade. It’s important to be able to access drivers either directly through a storage device or disk if a Network Interface Card (NIC) fails to communicate with external networks for gathering said drivers from the vendors.

Feature Updates

Many feature updates have less impact than if you were completely replacing or upgrading the Windows Operating System (OS). Failures may still occur and do, it’s still good practice to create backups of your devices when possible to different forms of media such as external hard drive disks, USB Drives, or Cloud Storage Devices.