If I upgrade from Win 2K Pro to XP Pro, will all my installed apps, printer driver etc etc be intact after the upgrade, or will there typically be loads of "holes" everywhere, demanding a reinstallation of key packages, e.g. Visual Basic, Word, Excel etc.
It's this reinstallation I'm desperate to avoid if at all possible. When I went from Win 98 to Win 2K, doing a clean install, the reinstallation of the apps took days, half of which was spent collating all the installation disks.
By the way I will make a TrueImage backup image of the entire disk before starting the upgrade process.
Most apps will be fine. Device drivers are the most likely things to need reinstallation. If you've got an image then what's the worst that can happen?
You will be lucky if any of them work without a reinstall and you would be much wiser to start with a clean slate anyway. The registry tends to end up insanely cluttered on an old machine. Some drivers are bound not to exist for old hardware on newer OSs HP are a nuisance for this.
Installing a newer OS over another as an "upgrade" tends to produce a hopelessly unstable hybrid even when it is *supposed* to work. Installing an already borderline geriatric OS is a bit crazy anyway.
Clean sweep and start afresh is always the best way to proceed when changing OS. Or you could use a partition manager on a single disk.
Hard disks are cheap! Install another disk instead and then you have the option of booting from either of them during the transition.
Can't afford Windows 7 twice. Just paid £170 last week for one bona fide Win 7 Ultimate from MS. Anyway, XP is all I need for everyday word processing, and VB6 can be a bit "iffy"under Win7.
I only believe in upgrading when it's absolutely necessary, and now even I have to admit that W2K is old old old. Not much of the latest software runs on it, either at all or only flakily. But I use XP SP3 all the time for everyday use and it's absolutely fine.
Sure, an image can be a lifesaver, and the worst that can happen is that I have to wipe the drive and start with a clean install of XP, but as I said, reinstalling all the apps takes ruddy forever, as I did it once already when "upgrading" from Win 98. Not only have I got over a hundred ActiveX controls in WinNT\System2, a number of them have been upgraded since first installation, so getting the drive back to how it was but with XP, going down that route would be a friggin' nightmare.
Anyway, as you say, I've got nothing to lose, and TrueImage is ruddy brilliant. You can actually mount an image (even if spread across 11 TIB files as my backup is) and read or copy any individual file from anywhere within the 70GB drive content.
I too would RATHER install clean from scratch, but I break out in a cold sweat when I review my Programs folder and see what lies ahead to reinstall everything.
Anyway, first things first, the backup, which is now progressing (11 DVDs, but also on a 1TB external USB hard drive for extra POM).
I successfully did this with my standard W2k build which is used across all my PCs, and the result is being used to type this now.
There are some caveats, see below.
This is bollocks. XP and 2k are the same major version number. 90-99% of everything will work fine.
But if they exist for 2k, by definition they exist for XP, unless they fall into a very small number of devices such as cameras and scanners. See below.
Again bollocks. XP and 2k being the same major version number, it's more likely to work with these two versions of Windows than almost any other that you could think of.
It depends on a lot of things. If, like myself and apparently the OP, if you have a great deal of software on a build, it can make perfect sense to upgrade rather than re-install.
See below.
Well, they're not as cheap relative to everything else as they were a couple of years ago, but whatever. I think I've made my point.
To the OP:
As you seem to have worked out, image the disk first, and preferably try to make sure the image can be reinstalled successfully. Then, if it all goes pear-shaped, you can simply re-image and try again. It might take several attempts to get it right.
You are most likely to have problems ...
- If you've applied security templates to the W2k build. You'll have to remove all the special security settings first, and applying the SetUp template won't be enough to do this, because it only sets up basic settings, not undoes previous settings. Until I did this, I couldn't get the upgrade to 'take' without problems in the result - particularly it's one of the causes of a well-known phenomenon of the Network Connections folder in Control Panel being empty, which is well-documented online, but no-one seemed to have an answer that fixed my problem, but I eventually worked out for myself that it was something to do with security, and undid all my 'improvements', and then it worked.
- If you have camera, scanner, phone, and possibly printer software installed. The first three, particularly, you will probably have to reinstall. This is because the image acquisition system is different under XP. This is why some phones, such as my own Samsung Galaxy Note II, are not supported under W2k but are under XP.
- If you have certain software starting from boot. For example, uninstall any firewall and anti-virus software before attempting the upgrade, and then reinstall the latter afterwards, remembering that XP is the first version of Windows to have its own firewall.
- Before attempting the upgrade, download SysInternals' rootkit checker and run a check, and run a complete AV scan.
Whether you do a complete reinstall, or upgrade, probably it's going to be more work than you think, but an upgrade should be perfectly possible.
TBH, do you actually NEED half of it? There's a lot of stuff gets installed because "it's always been there".
Oh, and
formatting link
- dead easy automated installer for a lot of the "generic stuff", without the toolbars/adware/bloatyjunk.
I'm also in the "scary amounts of cruft - fresh reinstall!" camp on this. One OS upgrade is just about doable. Upgrading a machine that's already been upgraded...
I'm just completing copying the TIB files onto DVDs (11 DVDs), so it won't be today now. Tomorrow, we'll see. If it all goes pear-shaped with the upgrade, I can just reinstate the Win2K image. (I have never known TrueImage to fail in the five years I've had it.) Even if everything "appears" okay, but after several days' use it certainly is not, then again, I can just either reinstate the original image or bite the proverbial bullet and install from scratch.
A couple of ways to mitigate this problem is either to install the new OS so that you can dual boot and return to the old, or alternatively capture the old platform as a virtual machine and then run it as a client on the new host OS. So you have a new machine, and can start migrating things as time permits, but also have the old one running in a window when you need it.
The way I deal with this problem is to install Windows, then, as I find a need for a program, I install it.
What I also do is, when I first install a program from its CD or DVD is to make an image of the install media with a note of any necessary validation codes in the same folder. Very few programs won't install from an image, and it's a *lot* faster than using the original media. On occasion, it can feel faster to rip an image and install from that than to install from the original media.
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