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i'm looking at upgrading to XP...good move? currently w/ ME... 1

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spewn

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May 7, 2001
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better choice than 2000?

- spewn
 
Yes, Go with XP Pro though. That isdures you have the Domain support you may need in the future. XP home only has support for the workgroup environment. Go for it. (read my post in the W2K Pro forum) James Collins
Field Service Engineer
A+, MCP

email: butchrecon@skyenet.net

Please let us (Tek-tips members) know if the solutions we provide are helpful to you. Not only do they help you but they may help others.
 
Personally, the only difference between my 2k and XP installs (and I actually do graphics work, not just play games) is the disk fragging. XP has some neat tools that move your more frequently used apps to the outer sector of the disk so they will load and respond faster, BUT!, there doesnt seem to be any rhyme or reason to its rearranging and it leaves my C drive, horribly fragged. IMO, XP just stands for Xccessory Pack. You dont need bells and whistles to surf the net, play games, and watch porn. You just need the thing to stay up (your comp that is). I'm sure some XP expert will show some figures that disagree with me, but what do I know, I only work on it for 12 hours a day. BEHOLD! As Steve Jobs introduces us the latest in desk-lamp technology!
 
I disagree jAQUAN. XP has more than just bells and whistles. There is better application support and Compatability. The user interface is better for the average user as well. So far XP for all the customers we install it for find it easy to use and stable. I have seen many people dont have any issues while others tend to have a lot of issues. James Collins
Field Service Engineer
A+, MCP

email: butchrecon@skyenet.net

Please let us (Tek-tips members) know if the solutions we provide are helpful to you. Not only do they help you but they may help others.
 
I guess as you become more and more of an advanced user, your idea of "user friendly" changes. And yeah I get different stories all the time too. I heard a lot of people say you cant run games on 2k, yet, install after install, I never had a problem playing the latest games. I'm sure newbs enjoy the automated features of XP like popping the scanner or digital camera right up. But for those of us who dont need to led around by the hand, it just gets in the way. I still cant use the software that came with my new scanner because XP hijacked the .dll and even if I could, the manual has a list of features that WONT work on windows based machines. WTF!? Then what machines WILL they work on? It just makes you wonder what level of users needs XP was designed to meet. BEHOLD! As Steve Jobs introduces us the latest in desk-lamp technology!
 
Agree with all. Personally...anything is better than ME. XP? For me...works like a champ. My favorite "home" feature? The fast user switching. Great when you have kids.

Cheers,
Pikk
 
I upgraded to XPpro from W2Kpro, which was an upgrade from NT. All were clean installs, on the same machine. Each OS upgrade went without problems, and each was a better environment than the one before.

I do/did the same work in each environment. Net Admin, Report development, etc. Not much graphics work

That said there are still some oddities with XP, but SP1 helped with most.

W2K is still my favorite all around, but XP is growing on me rapidly. However either of them is better than ME. ick!

Just be sure to do a Clean install!

Good luck!
 
Yes. Although personally if I had ME I would move to almost anything to get off it, what a disaster.

ALSO: Do a clean install. Amoung my friends only people who tried to do upgrade installs from 98 and ME had problems. The clean installs worked great.

On the otherhand, no one seems to have had a problem with an upgrade install from 2000.
 

how do you do a 'clean' install??

i got xp pro.

- spewn
 
Goto , find the floppy images for the XP pro install (should be 6 of em) and unpack each one to a different freshly formated floppy. (This is all if your comp wont boot from CD btw). Then just boot up with disk 1 in and follow the onscreen instructions. When you get to the partition part, delete any that are there, create a new one, format it as a FAT32 drive and continue with the install. It's pretty easy from there. BEHOLD! As Steve Jobs introduces us the latest in desk-lamp technology!
 
NTFS stands for NT file system, which is sort of a "live compression" which is supposed to give you way more disk space, good for servers, not for users. I guess it just takes longer to get to files you use often if you use NTFS. BEHOLD! As Steve Jobs introduces us the latest in desk-lamp technology!
 
I disagree. NTFS is a much more robust file system. It has nothing to do with compression other than it can use a smaller cluster size. I wouldn't recommend anyone using a FAT of FAT32 file system if they had the choice to use NTFS.

There might be a minor access hit because of NTFS, but it's much more likely that if you have a system crash, you will be in a LOT better shape if you are running NTFS than a FAT system. Also there is no file security in FAT only NTFS allows you to set file level permissions.
 
if you want to go with winXP, u better have a valid CD-Key
because when u want to do the windows update, the service pack is going to try to validate your CD-Key with microsoft's server... due to that i was forced to go back to win2k... untill a find a cracked version of the service pack...
 
Hi good techies, pleae can you help me. I am not sure this is the correct place but 'yooall' seem to know about XP.
I am trying to download the XP service pack 1 to my daughters HP Pavilion which came with XPinstalled. her system is awful, can take a minute to load a program in. and to have 2 running at once doubles the work time so I am hoping this will cure the problem,My WINME runs faster than this and I only have a clereon 111 and 433 proc plus 256 RAM. trouble is I have tried 5 times to download the thing, but the phone line goes down after 2 hours on the anytime rates so we havent managed to get it all in yet. I got a message suggesting I save this to disc then I could just reconnect and continue the download from where it left off. but so far I havent seen an option to do this.Any help would be grate fully received.
My masseuse has told me not to sit at the computer again until my back has relaxed. but I have to disobey her because my granadson has just started Grammar school and needs to do quite a bit of work on the computer.

also how do I back up her system before installing this pack. I am not sure where to go and what to do on that.
Thanks I am sure someone out there can help.
[2thumbsup] in advance. Learn something new every day.
 
If your phone line can't stay up long enough, you could order the CD or get a copy from a friend.

As for the backup. Create a restore point. If you don't know how, write back. You could also do a complete backup using something like Drive Image 2002.

One thing to check into is if HP is using some modified OEM version of XP. I've heard of people having problems with SP1 on Dell OEM installs of XP. I've done SP1 on Dell's with no problem, but they were all non OEM XP installs.

I must say though, that it sounds like there is more wrong with the system and that might be something you would want to look into.

Good luck.
 
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