One Media, Multiple Vistas

 18 Nov 2006 02:44:35 pm

Okay actually 2 medias, x86 and x64…

Under Windows XP you had different media for each version of XP and each licencing (i.e. Retail vs. MSDN vs . VLA vs. OEM). Multiply that out times the various availabilities and there were something like 12 different pieces of media a support team may need to do XP installs.

Fast forward to Vista. We’ve known for some time that they rolled the various versions into a single piece of media but the answer that I couldn’t get was whether there would be different media for Volume Licenses, MSDN & Retail.

The good news is that with RTM being available this week I can test and confirm for sure. So I downloaded the retail ISO from the connect site as well as the MSDN site and hashed both of them. I’m happy to report that the hashes are the same! I’ve been able to install on my work laptop using my VLA key, in the lab using my MSDN key and on my computer at home using my retail key!

I’m guessing that with OEM licenses it’s not going to be as straight forward, but hopefully they’ll follow the same builds internally (so at least you’d only need one piece of media per manufacturer).

Cheers,
Erik

Category : General | Posted By : Erik | Comments [0] | Trackbacks [0]