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A NEW OS IN THE SAME OLD CLOTHES!
There is a very nice technique to upgrade your PC, especially if
it is only a year or two old. XP Home has some nice features to facilitate
this procedure. If your PC fulfills the following requirements, upgrading
to XP can be a snap, plus you can still have the OLD environment totally in
place. This can be a real plus in certain situations!
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Disk of 20 GB or more
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Processor of 500 MHz or greater
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RAM of 256 MB minimum
The procedure for upgrade is as follows:
- If your Disk is a single partition, shrink the existing partition in half
using a tool such as partition magic. Of course you must look at the
disk space used to make sure you can do this. Unless your PC is full of
MP3s and Mpeg movies, you probably aren't using near 10 MB. Whatever you
ARE using, add maybe 1 GB and shrink the partition to this size.
It is likely that this partition is FAT32 if you are running Win95/98/ME.
It is probably NTFS if you are running XP. Win2K tends to be either
Fat32 or NTFS.
- Create a new partition out of the remaining disk space. No need to
format this partition, but be sure to unhide it. [if necessary of course you can even add a
new disk drive, and a new partition on the new
drive. This should work just as well. Just make sure you know
where it is and how to specify it to the XP install.]]
- Change your BIOS if necessary to boot from your CDROM.
- Boot the WinXP Home CDROM Upgrade. This is the best way to do a XP
install.
- Carefully follow the instructions, and install a new XP to the new
partition you just created. XP will setup a dual boot situation, with XP
as the default. You can always default to the old PC and its setup!
- Once XP is in place, run the "File and Settings Transfer Wizard."
Since the FAT32 of the old environment is visible to the new XP [a plus is
that the new NTFS environment is NOT visible to the old environment!], you can
actually specify the C:\ folder [your original environment] to save the file
created by the wizard. When you come back to the XP, just point the
wizard to the folder that was created under the old OS. If you have a
LOT of MP3s and MPEG movies, you can unselect those folders in the transfer
process. There is really no reason to copy those files into the new
partition. Just remember where they are, and repoint your applications
on the XP side to use the old location. In addition, the wizard will
create a huge file which may not fit in the old partition, so you
shouldn't do this anyway.
- Ta da... You have a new OS with the same exact hardware and software
settings. You are still going to have to reinstall your applications on
the XP side. I think you can reinstall all your old applications, you
should just uninstall them from the old PC to be strictly legal here....
- You will notice a slowdown if you have only 128 MB RAM and your PC is only
a few hundred MHz. So upgrade that RAM if you can to at least 256 MB
RAM. But 512MB would be real nice!
The File and Settings transfer wizard is a nice utility.
It allows for the transfer of a lot of Windows files and setting between most
any Windows OS. If you are transferring from an OLD machine which is NOT
an XP - no problem. Just insert the CD and browse to the CD folder and run
setup.exe. Click on the "other functions" entry and "file and settings
transfer wizard" will come up, even if you are on a Win98. You can even
designate the CD-R drive or a network USB drive for the destination in order to
allow the destination machine to acquire the old settings. You want to be
careful transferring old email .pst files, since these can be GBs of info!!
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