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General discussion

Upgrading fron Win 98 to XP

Feb 22, 2006 10:04PM PST

Hi

I was thinking about upgrading my operating system from win 98 se to XP, but before I do so, there are a couple of questions I would like help with.

1. Can you upgrade from win 98 to XP or do you need to perform a fresh installation.

2. My data files are stored on a 2nd hard drive formatted to fat32. Will XP be able to read my data files for word, excel, football manager etc...

Discussion is locked

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1. Your choice.
Feb 22, 2006 10:11PM PST

2. Danger. Is that the only copy? Installing an OS is never safe to hard disk content.

Bob

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Just make sure. . .
Feb 23, 2006 4:48AM PST

Your system will handle XP. Basic requirements are at least a 350 MHz processor, 256 Meg of RAM, and an ample HD. Also make sure you have driver updates for your peripherals such as sound card, video card, BIOS, optical drives, printers, scanners, modem, NIC, etc. Visit the sites of these devices and look for XP drivers. It's a good idea to back up what you can't afford to loose to optical media.

If all is well and you have the updates, remove the slave drive during installation. After you're up and running including the SP-2 update (unless the XP disk has it), newer XP updates, AV updates, drivers are working, etc., then reattach the slave drive. You'll have to activate the drive under XP. In Control Panel, click Administrative Tools, click Computer Management, on the left click Disk Management. From there you will activate the slave drive. XP will read the FAT32 drive. When I did this I copied all my saved data from the slave to the master HD. Then had XP format the drive to NTFS, then put all my stuff back.

Wayne

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Thanks
Feb 26, 2006 3:54AM PST

This reply helps a lot. Thanks.

Some of the xp I have seen for sale is oem, dsp. They are the cheapest versions I have seen. Is there any disadvantage to using these versions.

I know that oem is something like other equipment manufacturers and often comes at a cheap price when you purchase hardware and software from the same source, but what is dsp?

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Clean install
Feb 24, 2006 6:14AM PST

go with the clean install... upgradxe has all kinds of problems and just transferrs bad regisrty entries from 98 to XP...

Yes... you can read FAT32 with XP... but, best to convert to NTFS after successful install of XP...
NTFS is much more stable than FAT/FAT32...