Windows XP Upgrade.

[plightofthepureblood]

So, today, in an hour or so, Im going to be installing WindowsXP over my MindowsME.

Do any of you know how much information im going to lose here?
Is this going to be like, reformatting my Hard drive after a crash?
Do any of my programs ive installed carry over after something like this?

Im a bit nervous.

Ive backed up files and all.....but I just reformatted everything a few weeks ago so Even if i were to lose everything, I wouldnt be losing much.

Anyone else ever do this? Stories to relate? Anything?

[Apex]

Save all your stuff you want to keep to your main drive (Most likely your C.) and back it all onto a CD, incase it asks you to format your drive.

[Dragonium]

Right, I upgraded to Windows XP a short time ago, so I can remember it pretty well. I was upgrading from Windows 98, so I may not be able to answer anything WinME, but I'll try.

When you install (If this is the first time you've tried to upgrade) it'll give you a choice of things you want to do. There are a whole bunch, but the two you're interested in are "reformat C:\ and upgrade to NTFS system", and "convert files to NTFS system". I'm not sure about the exact wording, but it should be something like that.

If you choose the first, it'll erase everything and install normally. Make sure you back up stuff you want if you choose this.

The second one takes everything in your My Documents folder and saves it, then converts it to files that WinXP can use. This is the obvious choice if you can't back everything up, but there are two drawbacks.

a) It erases everything that's not in My Documents. So you lose everything on desktop and everything outside My Documents.

b) It takes a long time to convert. Took me 2 hours and crashed once. But then I had a lot of stuff on the computer at the time.

Also, WinXP might run a bit slow for the first few weeks. Simply put, it's a big step up in memory demand, so it'll run poorly. Once your computer "gets used to it" it'll be fine.

Good luck.

[plightofthepureblood]

All of my most prized software (My paintshop and RMXP/2k3) ar already saved to disk.

I may try to do the My Documents thing, just to save time on backing up my PNG images.

That was pretty helpfull....thanks man.

Im expecting it to run slow for the first little bit.