I'm actually finally officially entering the world of XP this week. In a few days my order of WinXP Home SP2 and an additional 512MB of RAM (to be added to my existing 128MB) should be arriving. I'll be upgrading from Win98SE (actually not an "upgrade" per se...I'm reformatting the drive and doing a clean install).

Any words of advice?

It's a lil prettier. Otherwise, you woint notice much of a difference unless you were having stability issues.

I think you'll notice quite a bit of difference. I find XP much different from win98SE.

If your hardware is a just few years old, I expect the install will happen without a hitch - XP will probably have all of the driver software for your machine/parts.

You've already planned to follow the only advice I had - a clean install, not an upgrade.

Have fun!

Really? I work with XP at home (XP Professional, corporate edition) and use Win98SE at work, and don't even skip a beat between the two. Only thing I've noticed is that some options are in different places, I guess the first time it's a lil disorientating.

Yep, I've been having a lot of stability issues.

I originally built this computer in 2000 but most of the hardware has been upgraded piece by piece since then. The only original hardware I have is the 'C' drive (30GB: a 10GB partition set aside for Linux, 20GB for windows...don't worry, I have a 60GB 'D' drive) and the network card. Everything else is (at most) 3 years old.

So what are some cool/critical/annoying things I should do/install/disable first?

Stability could be that HD. The older ones (relatively) don't have a long life span and the data becomes corrupt - moreso with Win98 than XP, but XP will have similiar issues, but will be mroe able to recover than 98 was.

Upgrading ye olde HD was the best thing I ever did for my PC - and they're really not expensive. Think of it like this - every reformat is like surgery for your HD. It's a tough process on the systems, and after a few too many times, it's not gonna work quite right, and it's a better idea to start fresh, so since you're reformatting it might be time for a new HD.

Oh, and I like to keep my OS'es on one primary hard disk and put everything - and i mean eveything - on a secondary disk. If something goes wrong, reinstall the OS or reformat the main disk, and the secondary stays awaiting a few basic reinstalls with "your system" as you know it intact.

You could be right about the hd. I'll drive by Fry's today and see if they've got some good deals going on. I haven't been wanting to upgrade it because then I'll lose my Linux install too and it will just make for more work. Oh well, it will probably save time in the long run. I guess this would be the best time to do it.

a typical hard drive will get about 5 years of normal use before it gets to the point of impending doom. the reason is because it's mechanical and the parts do wear down after a while.

Bill,

If you do happen to decide to replace your 30GB drive, you can use the Ultimate Boot CD's partition copying utility to dump the linux partition to another drive/partition without loss of data.

You can download it free at: http://ubcd.sourceforge.net

It has a lot of very cool utilities, to include most of the top brand hard drive utilities, motherboard testing utilities, and such. I've used it a couple of times and have found it very useful each time I needed it.

So what are some cool/critical/annoying things I should do/install/disable first?
Run Windows Update and keep running it until there's nothing left to install. Then, reboot and run it again.

Install and run the Microsoft Baseline Security Analyzer (http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/tools/mbsahome.mspx). Note that a couple of the DirectX updates it will find are included in SP2, so even though you install them they are still detected. Not to worry.

Turn off the "Luna" theme and revert back to "Windows Classic"--saves a ton of system resources as well as screen space. While you're at it, enable "ClearType" even if you have a CRT.

Set Automatic Updates to auto-download and auto-install at 3:00 AM or whatever the default is.

Consider doing day-to-day work as a non-Administrator (http://weblogs.asp.net/aaron_margosis/) user for added security.

You can download it free at: http://ubcd.sourceforge.net
Thanks for the link. I'll definitely be downloading that.

I moved up to WinXP Professional when I got tired of 98SE randomly flipping things off and on...

I've had WinXP crash ONCE. (installing an Apple product... go figure.) I am very, very happy with it.

Run Windows Update and keep running it until there's nothing left to install.

I'll say.

I recently got a new laptop and I'm giving my old one to a friend. I decided to "Restore" the disc on the old laptop to it's original factory pre-installed software state using DISE Disc Image software that I had on it, thus eliminating all my old files, programs and any bloating that may have occurred over the years.

Anyway, once that was done and that old original XP was on there, I ran Windows Update and got 23 Security Patches to download!! Yeech! Good thing I got DSL!

Well, that old mama runs just like new now. Faster than it's been in quite awhile. Must have had some bloat there. Probably was running more background process than I really needed. Could have been a few conflicting ones too. But she's humming fine now! Almost hate to give her up now! :)

...you can use the Ultimate Boot CD's partition copying utility to dump the linux partition to another drive/partition without loss of data.
Okay. I downloaded it and burned it to CD, but I can't seem to find which tool it is you're talking about. Is it HDClone? If so, I can't find that on the CD.

By the way, I picked up a 160GB (w/8MB buffer) drive at CircuitCity for $60 ($120 - 2x $30 rebates). Sweet! I plan on just dumping my 60GB drive onto the 160GB drive and using the 60GB drive as my main C drive (it's only about 1.5 years old and is nice and fast and quiet). Then I'll wipe the 30GB drive that seems to be failing and destroy it. Or maybe I'll play with it and see if I can eek a little more life out of it but not use it for anything critical. I haven't decided yet.

Press F2 for Hard Disk Tools
Press the space bar 4 or 5 times to get to the 5th page of utilities. The last page has the HDClone utility as well as several other partition tools. The UBCD homepage has links to the respective utilities homepages so you can check them out before you use them.

What's weird is that nothing happens when I press F2. The menu flashes, but it doesn't give me the Hard Disk Tools menu. Every menu item works for me except F2 and F3. (I downloaded the Full version, not the Basic version.)

I figured out the problem. My keyboard has an "F Lock" button that needed to be turned on so I could use the F keys. (Only F2 and F3 weren't working though.) :rolleyes: Now I can navigate the menus.

My RAM and OS arrived today. Now the real fun begins. :D

What do you guys think of NTFS? Is it really better than FAT32? I know it's easy to later upgrade to NTFS if I find it necessary, but harder to go back to FAT32. So I'm planning on just formatting in FAT32. Especially since the NTFS volumes won't be accessible if I have to boot in DOS.

Last night I tried running HDCopy to copy my 60GB drive to the 160GB drive and man is it slow. After 2 hours it was only 12% complete. So I tried PC Inspector Clone Maxx and it completed in about 1.5 hours. So if any of you ever need to clone a hard drive, don't waste your time with HDCopy.

Then after cloning it only created a 60 GB partition so I used Partition Resizer to make the partition bigger. Unfortunatly my hardware doesn't support drives larger than 136GB so it only shows up as 136GB. I'll have to see what happens after I install XP and whether or not it will recognize it as 160GB or what. The drive came with tools to install for OS support of larger drives, but I don't know if it will try to overwrite all the data or not. Worst case I'll have to split it into 2 partitions.

Use NTFS. You won't be sorry. The advantages far outweigh any disadvantages. Here (http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/home/using/productdoc/en/choosing_between_NTFS_FAT_and_FAT32.asp) is the word from Microsoft on the subject, here (http://www.theeldergeek.com/ntfs_or_fat32_file_system.htm) is another well-informed opinion, and I haven't been able (http://www.google.com/search?q=ntfs+or+fat32&sourceid=opera&num=0&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8) to find anyone recommending FAT32 for Windows XP.

I never really cared for drive overlay programs. They're more trouble than they're worth. I'd advise keeping separate partitions anyway with multiple OS's.

NTFS is fine. In XP you'll have the recovery console which will grant you access to your drives if need be. Also, there are 3rd party utilities that actually provide NTFS drivers to DOS.

Thanks. NTFS it is then.

I'm up and running in XP now.

I ended up not setting things up the way I had planned. Instead of dumping the 60GB drive onto the 160GB drive and using it as the new primary drive I just left it as the secondary and formatted the 160GB drive into 2x 60GB NTFS partitions leaving some room for Linux and installed XP onto the first of those 60GB partitions.

Since the "older" 60GB drive has all my backups on it I left it formatted as FAT32 and I'll be moving things over as I install the software those documents go with. I may or may not reformat it as NTFS depending on the NTFS support in Linux. I need to be able to exchange files between the two OSes. If Linux can mount and write to an NTFS partition then it won't be a problem. Otherwise I'll have to use a "shared" FAT32 partition. But that's something I can deal with later on down the line and I don't have to worry about it right now.

I set up an admin account and limited user accounts for everyone in the house (including myself). Now I'm in the process of learning how to manage these accounts. The admin side of XP is new to me, although admin tasks aren't totally foreign to me in general. I enjoy it so this should be fun.

I also installed all available critical Windows updates and set it to automatically check for new updates. I installed AVG Free antivirus software.

XP installed really easily with no problems. It's running great. With the 640MB of RAM and the new faster drive it's just screeming along. Of course, I don't really have any software loaded right now to bog things down. I installed the necessary Firefox browser of course and my printer. Amazingly enough, I didn't even have to restart after installing the printer as I had to do in Win98. I think I'm liking XP.

Now about these user accounts...Is there any way I can set things up so that the default user folders are on a drive other than the C drive? I haven't really had the time to do a whole lot of digging around yet, but from what little I have done I couldn't find anything.

probably the easiest thing to do is get tweakUI from microsoft at http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/downloads/powertoys/xppowertoys.mspx

among allowing you to easily make a lot of other registry 'tweaks,' it should let you change the paths to most, if not all, of the special folders.

If everyone who will be using the machine is comfortable in Firefox, I suggest setting the Internet Zone's security level to "High" and adding these to the Trusted Sites zone: http://*.microsoft.com/ https://*.microsoft.com/ This will let Windows Update (which requires IE) to continue working while basically locking down any other sites.

probably the easiest thing to do is get tweakUI from microsoft..
Sweet! Thanks.

If everyone who will be using the machine is comfortable in Firefox...
We've all been using Firefox for some time now and only need to use IE for the occasional site that doesn't work in Firefox. There aren't very many, but sometimes my son will want to play an online game that requires IE, like Disney's Toontown. I'll probably follow your suggestion, then if we run into sites we really want to use and that require IE I'll just add those to the trusted sites too. Thanks for the tip.