One of our computers still has W98 on it and needs to go to XP. The original hard drive had a Western Digital overlay on it due to the larger drive with an older motherboard used at the time. The current motherboard can handle larger HDDs. Along the way, the HD was replaced with a newer one and basically the old info plus the overlay were copied to the new HDD.

In a nutshell, this computer has W98 with an overlay program that's not needed.

If I go to an XP upgrade disc, will XP "adopt" the overlay or will it go to it's own file managing system? Something tells me I'm stuck with the overlay unless I start with a clean drive. I'm only moderately computer literate so I don't want to make my life miserable for the sake of an upgrade.

If I started fresh, could I expect to somehow migrate email, bookkeeping, piles of documents, etc to the new drive without being here for two or three days worth of misery?

All nerdy advice gratefully accepted.

Tom,
Provided your system hardware meet the minimum requirements, I will give you the following advice. I have seen this conundrum many times and the good news is , they all get the same answer from me. Save yourself some time and back up your files on other media and start fresh. You can get an OEM full version of XP Pro for about 125-140 or XP Home for about 85-100. The upgrade version of XP is just another rug on top of those proverbial rotten floor boards. Install the new OS, AVG antivirus (free version),windows updates and an adware program. Then you can move some of your old data to the new system. This method assures no bad files,virues or adware get mixed up on your new OS.

Your Email can be copied and pasted as exported data in outlook. " Email me" with your questions if you like. I installed a new OS for a friend last week over the phone and it took about 30 minutes for the install. It took much longer to do the updates but the system moves much better.

Your friend Rob

I personally agree that it's a total waste of time to even bother unless you are going to reformat and start fresh. Tom, can't you just put the PC on a network so you can easily transfer the data to another PC before you reformat?

I would definitely start fresh, but you don't need to buy a full version of XP. The "upgrade" version will give you the option to cleanly reformat and reinstall Windows, it just wants to see an older version before it starts. In fact, if you have an older Windows install disk(i.e. Win98 or 95) you can start the install with a new unformatted drive. The install process will ask for the old disk, just to verify that you qualify for the upgrade.

As a computer technician I also recommend you start from scratch. I have seen countless attempts to upgrade from a previous operating system with nothing but disaster for the client and the technician in the end.

It cost's less in time, labor and materials to build a new system from scratch then it does to try and upgrade a computer with older hardware and software. In todays rapidly changing technology environment a new computer you buy today will most likely be obsolete by the time you buy it.

In my business we try to buy as many of the same components as we can at one time so we can build computers and create images of identical machines. Because the industry changes so rapidly we wind up having to buy different hardware two to three times per year because the previous hardware is no longer available on the market.

In other words... Don't waster your time trying to keep old hardware up and running. You'll wind up spending more time and labor trying to keep it working then it costs to buy a new computer.

Splurge for a few hundred bucks and get a new CPU for Gosh Sakes!

if you dont have at least 256 ram dont waste your time

My computer started out as a server; a Dell PowerEdge 400. 3.2GHz P4 w/800MHz FSB, 256M of RAM, 40G HD, on-board Giga-bit ethernet, CD-rom & floppy drives. Not too bad for $600. It came with RedHat Linux, but I use W2KPro. I agrre with the need for lots of RAM.

I have since added a Gig of RAM, a Pioneer DVR-106 burner, a Hauppage Win-TV TV tuner/AV input card, a Radeon 7500 AGP video card, a Pioneer DVR-111 burner (this one dual layer) and a wireless Microsoft 6000 mouse/keyboard. Total in it now is about $1100.

I have played with XP on other computers, but I find it too cumbersome, and it is extremely resource-hungry. W2K is enough like W98SE to suite me, and it's stable enough that I only restart it weekly or less often. I went a month once, just to see if I could. I could.

Mine has rack and pinion steering and I only have to caress it every 3 weeks

Win XP is plenty stable for me - even better than Windows 98SE (and far better than ME which lasted exactly 3 hours on my PC before I took it off and went back to 98). My main PC - which is used very heavily - I reboot every 2 or 3 weeks (usually due to an update, not a problem). Another system that is used less often once lasted 4 months before it needed to be rebooted (a couple strange things started happening). Stability has a lot to do with the kind of hardware you run on.

For about the last 9 months my main PC has been using XP MCE2005 and it feels just as stable as plain XP (and I do have it doing daily scheduled recordings and such).

But I agree - do NOT waste your time trying to upgrade the current operating system, it will just be a nightmare. If you're determined to use that hardware then make sure it at least has enough memory (256mb is a bare minimum) and then do a fresh, clean install (which involves reformatting the hard drive to remove all junk that resides - remember to backup your data elsewhere).

Thanks for all who replied. The new CPU is a good idea. The one I have has been very stable and I've resisted upgrading. I keep old computers that are stable a long time - a speedster that is unstable is of no value to me.

Rob, it's hard to picture a 30 minute job of it. Even networked it will take some serious time for me. Oh well, gotta do it.