There is a workaround for the silly way in which Vista checks to make sure that you are actually upgrading a previous version of Windows. I wrote about this previously, where I actually had to install Windows XP to use the 32 bit upgrade of Windows Vista after I had “mistakenly” formated over my XP installation to install a clean copy of Windows Vista.

There is a way around this that I mentioned in the previous article though.

Install Windows Vista 32 bit on a clean partition using the partition tools, but do not enter in a license key. Once Vista is completely installed you can boot into it for the first time. At this step you will figure out that even when entering in a valid key (although for an upgrade), you will be unable to actually use it because Vista still demands that it be upgraded from a previous version and not a clean install. To get around this, just install Vista on top of itself as an upgrade which circumvents the whole purpose of this silly routine … making sure you have Windows XP or Windows 2000. When you upgrade your unlicensed version of Windows Vista 32 bit you will have no ill effects, a “semi” clean install, and a useless “Windows.old” directory that you can just delete. With this method you do not have to touch your XP disk, although you will have to install Vista twice. What a pain.

Alright, I went to add notepad and wordpad to my Send To folder like I always have for each of the previous operating systems. Thanks to the “simplified” (and admittedly cleaner) users folder and the disappearance of settings, I could not find the way to customize the Send To command. A search in the Vista help produces basically nothing.

I finally found the solution. Just enter in the following in your power search box (Start -> “Start Search”).

%APPDATA%\Microsoft\Windows\SendTo

Once the folder is opened just drag shortcuts of any program you would like to appear there into that folder. Not as easy as WindowsXP is it?

An alternate title for this post could be “How I managed to memorize my Vista key in one day.”

In previous versions of Windows when you purchased the Upgrade version of the new operating system you could always just insert the CD of the previous version during the install to verify that you indeed had a previous version and were eligible for the upgrade version. In Vista, as far as I can tell, this is not possible. It actually checks for a previous operating system for an upgrade key. This makes for a huge inconvenience that in the end is completely retarded because there is a “workaround” that nullifies the whole process. …