Millennium to 2000...

Bard

Curious...

Is there an upgrade path from Windows ME to Windows 2000, or is it a case of zapping the HDD and installing the O/S from scratch?

BioHazRd

I've always been a fan of formatting the hd before installing a new os - you never know what sort of crap has been left behind otherwise.
afaik it's just a matter of popping in the win2k cd from within winME if you do want to upgrade. Win2k rocks (compared to ME)

Clinical Waste

Yeah, its best to remove all those nasty little tentacles that ME will leave on your system awaiting the best time to bring your system to its knees.

You know you have to. Theres never an easy option in PC's

Gerry

Formatting is way overrated, apparently its some form of panacea. People are often shocked when they format and reinstall and their problem is still there.

Windows installs files into your windows dir and its sub directories, obviously enough. Theres a few files which are installed into the root directory, these are only used for dos mode and booting windows, you can delete them if you want, leaving them will do no harm. Windows also creates some directories under program files.

THATS IT.

Delete those directories (boot into dos with a bootdisk when you are deleting the windows directory)

Then windows me is gone, and you can install win2k.

I've formatted my drive once since I got it, and so haven't lost any data since.

Bard

thats grand so... I'll do the u/g if poss. and just zap the "restore old windows" files.

Cheers,

Clinical Waste

..........and when you decide to use the more stable ntfs system in Win2000 and lose it all anyway.....

If not
Still some of your installed software blows the preverbial raspberry (bsod) because it was installed for win9x/me.

Whatever, something will fu.

Guaranteed.

Gerry

In my experience, running programs which were installed on win9x has never caused a bluescreen for me, if they don't work its because they deposited files in the windows folder, and added registry, so they need to be reinstalled under win2k. Big deal, you can still keep all your data.

Clinical Waste

What, you don't back up your data?
Don't keep a copy on a 2nd partition or 2nd HDD or even CD.

When upgrading the quickest & simplest part is copying your data back.

Different strokes fer different folks I guess.

Gerry

I have some stuff on cd, other stuff is backed up onto a remote machine.

Clinical Waste

Excellent.

Anyway, tell us how it goes Bard.

(I can still fit in some Humble Pie)

sceptre

There's no upgrade from ME to 2000, Bard (MS say as much but I don't have a link for you)

You will of course be able to dual-boot but I assume you don't want to do that - handy for playing NFS though

Zapping the HD is the only way you can go.

Mountjoy Mugger

MS give you the bad news here:

http://www.microsoft.com/windows2000/professional/howtobuy/upgrading/path/default.asp

Only thing to do is a clean install.

EDIT: Soz, Sceptre - didn't spot your reply.

Bard

Interesting reading that... but utter b*llocks as it turned out Maybe their web site was wrong ... maybe it's just that my Win2K is an MSDN disc with less restrictions - whatever it is, the result is the same .. it IS possible to upgrade from Windows ME to Windows 2000 - not only that, but it's quick and easy too. I know... I did it a couple of days ago on my groovy new laptop.

A couple of drivers and stuff needed updating but that was simple stuff. I now have the following setup:

A Pentium III-500Mhz tower machine with 160Mb RAM and 12GB HDD running Windows 2000 patched to SP2 plus hotfixes.

A Celeron 1.1Ghz laptop machine with 256Mb RAM and a 30GB HDD running the same, having upgraded from Windows ME (which comes supplied on a 'Recovery' disc).

These are networked together through a cross-over RJ45 cable.

Simple, really.

b20uvkft6m5xwg

I'm in a bit of a similar situation meself as Niall....

Just ordered new Dell Laptop with XP.
I'm not sure whether to keep XP or Install Windows 2000 if I can get my hands on a copy.

What have ppl's experiences been, because it looks like I'm going to have to have make decisions quickly before I put any data on the HDD between OS's!

XP or Win 2000 ?????
.....Basically

sceptre

Originally posted by 80project
Just ordered new Dell Laptop with XP.
I'm not sure whether to keep XP or Install Windows 2000 if I can get my hands on a copy.

What have ppl's experiences been, because it looks like I'm going to have to have make decisions quickly before I put any data on the HDD between OS's!

Given that it's a new machine (read "fast" for that), I'd stick with XP - loks nice, acts nice and generally is more stable than even 2k, imho. I popped it on my laptop a while back. Only a p3-450 but the 384 megs of ram help in a big way for apps

Would it be XP Pro or Home though? Supposedly XP Home can't become part of a domain (dunno if that's an issue for you or not when you're out doing demos or whatever)

Obviously there's the game advantage with XP but if the damn thing was written in the last year, using DirectX properly, it could well run on 2000 anyway. If you're not a big game player, doesn't make much of a difference, if you are, a win98 partition is always handy anyway.

Interesting info btw Bard - I'll keep that one in mind (and stand corrected - they pushed that "can't go from ME to 2k very hard, looks like I fell for it)

b20uvkft6m5xwg

Originally posted by sceptre
Would it be XP Pro or Home though? Supposedly XP Home can't become part of a domain (dunno if that's an issue for you or not when you're out doing demos or whatever)

Seamus,
Its XP Home Edition
I'm not a big gamer at all, so XP might not be that much of an advantage. I dont doubt the stabilty of XP, but I haven't heard anyone say anything bad about Win2k Pro. The networking aspect will potentially be more important so I will prolly plumb for that!

BTW I presume if I'm buying it with XP installed, I will have to format the HD before I would install Win2k or could I just change it to Win2k fairly easily!?

Thx:)

sceptre

Won't say "you can't do it without formatting" as I did get caught out last time I said that (thanks Niall) but think if you want to install 2000 on a system pre-packaged with XP you're probably better off formatting in any case (nice clean install and all that).

I think it might well be faster to format the drive and install from scratch rather than fiddling around with boot files etc - as you probably know Win2000 (and XP) basically install themselves when you click the usual few buttons (compared with win98 etc) so it won't be too much hassle

AFAIK (assuming the drive is coming prepackaged with ntfs rather than fat32), XP uses NTFS 5.5 rather than win2000's NTFS 5.0 (though there's no problem reading an XP drive with a 2000 machine) so it might like it a little better if you gave the whole thing a nice clean enema first

And I can't fault 2000. Have it on my desktop (like it a lot plus only just got my SBlive XP drivers) - had the laptop upgraded to XP from ME (from 98SE and 98 before that) before going for a clean install there, treble-booting with Linux and 98.

Don't need the game support? Might need to connect to a domain controller? 2000's yer best man for the job.