I’m finally upgrading my 5 year old computer to XP (ME will be the death of me). I’ve never done this before. Do I just throw the disk in the tray and it overwrites ME or is there some hideous gyration I need to perform? I’m The Last Person On Earth who cares to fuck around with this and I’ll hire someone to do it if it’s more than a couple basic commands. Can someone tell me what’s involved? Thanks!!
Take my advice: Do a clean install. If ME will be the death of you yet, upgrading from ME to XP will be an excersize in building the casket. Not that the install is problematic, but running XP from thereon will give you nothing but migranes. The best thing you can do for yourself is to eradicate all traces of WinMe before installing XP. Back up all data you deem necessary/desirable, boot from the XP CD (or a startup floppy if your system does not support booting from a CD/DVD drive), begin the install process and then, when given the option to do so, have the XP install format your boot partition to NTFS and let it install cleanly. You’ll be glad you did.
You can upgrade me by just popping the CD in and telling it to perform an upgrade installation. However, the result is going to be that applications may not work and data files like all your e-mail will seem to go poof. The data will still be there - somewhere - as long as you don’t choose to reformat your hard drive but upgrading that way is about 75% of the effort of starting with a new computer.
You have to make an inventory of what you have, what is important, and how you plan to get it to work again once you upgrade.
Before you attempt the upgrade at all, first make sure that all of your computers hardware is XP compatible. And above all, even though the XP box says the minumum amount of memory needed is 128 MB, make sure you have NO LESS than 256 MB of memory. The 128 MB is barely enough to run XP and leaves nothing left to run applications. If you have to upgrade very much of the hardware before you can even upgrade, it may make more sense to just get a new computer. You can buy a brand new fairly decent computer now days for $300 to $400.
Man…this is already sounding scary. I will probably be better off getting someone to do it for me. I already have to restrain myself from wingin’ this box through the picture window. This upgrade will probably put over the edge.
Thanks for your help!
That’s not true.
One of my systems at home is an 800 MHz system with 128 MB of RAM, and it runs XP just fine, and has plenty of memory for the applications I run on it (mostly web surfing, office, and listening to music).
I wouldn’t run XP on a system with less than 128 MB of RAM, though. And, more memory is better. XP doesn’t have the bug that ME has where it goes goofy if you have more than 512 MB of RAM, so you can load it up if you want.
I vaguely recall XP taking up about 60 MB of RAM while it’s running. I’m not at home now, but I can get an exact number tonight if it’s an issue.
I personally always use FAT32 partitions. That way, if something gets royally hosed, I can boot from a win98 boot floppy, copy off the files I need to save, and recover more easily. There are pros and cons to each file system. FAT32 partitions can’t be greater than 32 MB (IIRC).
Some other notes about upgrading from ME to XP:
All of your software may not work. Games that worked on ME are not likely to work on XP. Just about anything made by Microsoft probably will work ok, in my experience. Old version of office, etc. are no problem.
All of your hardware may not work. Check to make sure everything in the system is XP compatible.
Based on your comments so far, find someone else to do it for you. Installing XP is just as easy as installing any other Windows OS, but you don’t seem to be very comfortable doing an install from scratch. Like the others in this thread, I recommend doing a clean install rather than trying to upgrade your existing ME install. If you can’t find someone to install it for you, and you are squicked out by doing a clean install, you can just put in the CD and upgrade.
Note that XP is part of the NT line of windows. It has two classes of users, ADMINISTRATORS and USERS. USERS have limited access to the system. It is best to set up the computer as an administrator and then run it as a user, but if you are used to ME (which doesn’t have the concept of a limited user in it) you’ll be aggrivated by not being able to do certain things while in USER mode. If you want to use your computer pretty much the way you do now, you can set up XP to have a single user who has ADMINISTRATOR priviledges.
I have 128 mb sdram and 40.0 gb hard drive, pentium iii
I’m a little nervous about bringing this up, lest I start a Mac-PC flame war, but given that you’re already dissatisfied with your PC, would a Mac Mini be a better choice than XP?
I’ve done the XP upgrade multiple times, once from ME.
Go here for the best directions on how to do this upgrade. I’ve followed the instructions to the letter each time and had absolutely no problems. But read through all the steps carefully before you start. And by all means, do a clean install.
Thanks for the link! I’ll take a look at it.
I did the ME to XP upgrade; and did not do a clean install. I used the upgrade feature in XP and let it rip (I decided not to switch from FAT32 so my data wasn’t screwed up).
Not a single issue. (ME’s problems are overstated; the only reason I upgraded was that Microsoft gave me a free copy of XP Pro.)
A clean install is nice, but an upgrade is no problem.
It may be. I’ve worked on Mac before and I liked it a lot. However, I don’t actually hate my computer. I just have a hard time with ME. As I hear it from folks who know, ME blows moose udders in hell and I tend to agree. Some things either don’t run smoothly or are hard to install with ME. My HP Photo Printer is one example.
Before I got my computer that has XP on it, I had one with ME. Until it could no longer find both the CD burner and the DVD player, I never had a problem at all with it. Well, that is as long as I remembered to reboot the POS at least once every 1 1/2 hours. :rolleyes:
That’s what I’m fearing. It gets a little weirder each day.