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xp operating systems

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by johnroberts01

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yes i have windows 2000 pro. i was wanting to upgrade to windows xp can you use windows xp home edtion or do you nessaryly have to use the xp pro. upgrade i hade tried the xp home on my computer and it worked just fine but i had borried it from a fiend who has moved my system crashed and i had to reinstall windows 2000 pro . the question in pont is cani i use windows xp home or do i need to upgrade to windows xp pro. i am a bigginer at this and really need to know which system i need can you help me ?

4 replies

by charliespencer

I think this question was asked recently. I remember the answer was that you could not do that without erasing the hard drive first, but my memory is pretty poor. Either search here at TR or go to MS's web site and look for the upgrade options from 2000 to XP.

by toivo talikka

...is not possible from Windows 2000 Professional. Be aware that if you get an upgrade version of Windows XP Professional, you install it and your system crashes, you cannot use the XP Upgrade CD to install your system from scratch, you will have to
a) rescue your data from the hard drive
b) do a clean install of Windows 2000 Pro
c) upgrade to Windows XP Pro
d) copy the data back

That is quite a complicated process and it will take most of the day - been there, done that (not my system but a friend's).

My recommendation is to buy a full Retail version of Windows XP, and Home is cheaper than Pro, copy the data to another disk drive or USB Flash memory or burn a CD, do a clean install and start from scratch.

Now that Vista is available, Windows XP should soon be going for a song. Just watch out for the sites selling XP for $20-$70, they may not be genuine offers or even legit.

The other option is to pay nothing and order a free CD from Ubuntu at http://ubuntu.com. It is a Linux distribution which is easy to use and installs itself easily on old PCs. More importantly, you can load the CD and try it fully without writing anything to your hard drive. It comes with OpenOffice2 and heaps of other free software, definitely worth trying.

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