Windows 2000 => Windows XP Pro Upgrade

Yeah, one: I'd only do that if I had to. Getting all the software re-installed and working can take hours. With the emphasis on "working".

I'd get a second drive and load a fresh copy of XP. Then over time load up all the apps. Swapping back to 2K when you need to do work. It can easily take 2-3days of work to get all apps loaded and working. Once finished with the Xp drive, make the jump to XP. Set the 2K drive as a slave, just in case you need them.

Merry Christmas!

Keep in mind, this isn't "Kablam" or "Phumpt" land ;-) ...Jim Thompson

-- | James E.Thompson, CTO | mens | | Analog Innovations, Inc. | et | | Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC's and Discrete Systems | manus | | Phoenix, Arizona 85048 Skype: Contacts Only | | | Voice:(480)460-2350 Fax: Available upon request | Brass Rat | | E-mail Icon at

But with SW or OS upgrades it can quickly become "Oh dang!" land :-)

No joke, yesterday it took me an hour to figure out that the latest and greatest Thunderbird email client ain't so great after all. Installed an older version (never, ever throw out old install files) and now it's working. After some further massaging, of course. If error messages were a bit less nonsensical it would help. Windows is sometimes particularly explanatory at that, things like "An error has occurred ... shutting down".

So far I have not upgraded a single O/S since Win98. I just replace the computer after a few years. I still have one Win2K machine left (this one), which was state-of-the-art back in '03, and it will be migrated to the newer XP-Pro system sitting beside it Real Soon Now. No more AGP, better SATA support etc.

If I *had* to do it, I'd image the disk onto a new drive ($100) using Acronis or something similar ($30, IIRC), boot from the new disk and try "upgrading" that. It will probably work okay. But.. the machine is probably old and slow, and even a cheap new machine will perform better. And transferring and re-installing just the programs you need means the registry isn't as bloated as after years of installing and removing stuff, so an older machine will not be as taxed, and even a cheap newer machine will fly.

BTW, I'm working with Win 7 Premium 64-bit (on a netbook of all things).. the "permissions" causes problems with some programs.. and they split the Program Files directory into 32-bit and 64-bit directories, so programs that assume things can run into difficulties. Both those are "sacred ground" and programs cannot write to those areas without running under elevated privileges. Still some old programs (eg. acdsee ca. 1997) run beautifully.. sadly, even older

Best regards, Spehro Pefhany

The two most expensive versions of Win 7 (I don't recall the names) will let you download a free virtual Win XP, so you can run the old stuff.

Yeah, but even if Jim saved every patch for every app he's ever applied, odds are that if there was a choice, he downloaded the W2K patch, not the one for XP.

And now that product version is outdated and its supporting patches have been pulled off the company web site. Saving all the W2K patches only guarentees one can rebuild a W2K system.

The only thing of consequence running on the 2K machine is PSpice. It's known to run on XP.

Virtually all the other apps are specialty items written by my son... by definition they always work ;-)

And UltraEdit... it just keeps on going ;-) ...Jim Thompson

In message , Glen Walpert writes

And it's very good, my email/news client won't run under native Win7 so I'm typing this in a virtual machine. Really simple to install, no setting up to speak of (I accepted defaults) and it runs very quickly.

No printers, network adapters, video cards, etc. that you've downloaded patches for?

Nope. ...Jim Thompson

True, but I really don't rely on patches. I store whole install files and that has always worked well.

Same here. I maintain a directory tree named "Program Installs". ...Jim Thompson

Sometimes it can pay off though. When the HD on a roughly four year old laptop croaked it took all those drivers with it. Dell had all those available as downloads. Lo and behold there was a new driver for the graphics and it sped up video rendering, big time. To me this is important because I must sometimes watch DICOM loops from medical ultrasound scans. So the laptop is now literally better than new.

So do I, in the "My Documents" tree. However, some programs insist on being installed directly from the web. For those programs, the only thing in my "Install" director is downloader file. I make sure I have a good set of backups but that doesn't help with bitrot.

software

:-)

and

Installed an

applied,

have

I really do not think that win2000 -> winXP-Pro is really an upgrade. As has been repeatedly said, "If it ain't broke, don't fix it."