VeeshanVault

My computer is about 2 years old, but I really don't think it's all that bad. I'm looking to upgrade later this year, but in the mean time, I'm wondering about upgrading my OS to Windows XP.

Right now I have an AMD Duron processor, 512 MB RAM and Windows ME as an OS. (people usually point and laugh when I say that) I've never had an iota of trouble with ME, but I understand there are some issues with it (like Microsoft not supporting it anymore) which warrent an upgrade consideration.

My question, to start I guess, is how tough is it to do? Is it just popping a few CDs in and clicking yes at a few prompts? Will I lose anything important or have to reinstall anything? (like EQ, lord knows I do not want to go through the pain of downloading all that!) Will I notice any improvement in how my PC runs? Don't get too technical on me!

Thanks for your input should you decide to to give any!

Best thing to do is buy an OEM version of Winxp professional. Its usually under 100 dollars and can be booted from. Dont buy an upgrade version. When you upgrade it replaces your OS but it can leave some crap in various directories that may cause problems down the line. Usually you have to reinstall half of your programs either way. So your best bet is to boot from the CD, wipe your drive, and install XP from fresh. It sucks reinstalling EQ but you will have less of a headache in the long run.

Just remember to backup your junk sistah! Now gimme some sugah!

You don't have to format to do a fresh install, just install to a new directory "c:\winnt" for example. EQ doesn't put any shit in the registry anyway, so will work quite happily without a reinstall as long as your video/sound drivers are ok. Some other applications do make heavy use of the registry however, and will require reinstalls to work.

I still personally prefer 2000 to XP.. of course, you can't buy 2000 now.. anyway.

Either OS will probably run better than ME, and fresh installs always run better than 2 year old installs.

Well... I dont think I'd want to reinstall EQ. If you have more than one partition, just make sure EQ isn't on the system partition where you'd install XP. Then you can format it, install XP and when done create a shortcut on the desktop for EQ.

Another solution to reinstalling is to burn your EQ to DVD before reformatting. Which means you'd need a DVD burner though. You can get a decent 4x DVD burner fairly cheap, relatively speaking, these days.

Actually, as long as you still have the WinME CD, you can buy an upgrade version of XP and do a fresh install of XP without doing an upgrade. I did this with my PC when I upgraded. You put the ME disk in first and then the XP disk.....it will ask if you want to upgrade or if you want to reformat the drive and you will lose all your data blah blah blah.