At 07:45 PM 2/24/2002, Don Penlington wrote:
>Harvey writes:
>
><<Can
>anyone tell me if would be better to upgrade it to Windows 98 Second
>Edition which cost $51 US with taxes or upgrade to Windows XP >>
>
>If you upgrade to XP, be prepared to replace some or most of your
>hardware.  By all accounts, you may have difficulty running printer, modem,
>scanner, CDRW, etc unless specifically designed for XP (ie less than 6
>months old). Some products have updated drivers, others apparently not.
>
>And some older programs may not run on XP. You'll also need double the
>memory to run XP decently. You can check the Ms site for compatibility, but
>I believe this is not infallible.  A lot of people seem to have been caught
>out by Ms saying their system is OK for XP when, after burning their
>bridges, they find they need expensive upgrades.
>
>Unless you are a technician capable of doing your own upgrading (or wealthy
>beyond measure),  my guess is that upgrading any system more than a year
>old is likely to cause problems.
>
>Depends on what you want to do on your computer whether any upgrade would
>be worthwhile.

I really dislike disagreeing with anyone, but this advice is not sound.  I have
upgraded numerous PCs to WindowsXP over the last many months, PCs
with older hardware and I am yet to have any credible problems.  WinXP
has a tremendous driver database to deal with older hardware, such as
modems, video cards, SCSI cards, network cards and so forth.

When I upgraded my personal client PC with a three year old 56k USR modem,
2940UW Adaptec SCSI card, a two year old Linksys NIC, two year old USB
ZIP drive and an ABIT Siluro GF256 GTS 64mg video card...  the upgrade
went seamlessly.   I did download a new video driver, but that is to be expected
with any operating system upgrade.

I have been working on the install guide for WindowsXP and a review of the
product for a while now and they should appear on the web site soon.  But,
in summary of WindowsXP, although it does require a decent speed CPU
and at least 64mgs of ram to perform well, my experiences with it have todate
all been favorable.  My personal client machine has only been rebooted
4 of 5 times in the last five months.  It is stable and runs nearly all the Windows
software that I have been using for quite sometime.  I will admit that I have
found one program that will not load, it was only a simple CD catalog program
that was fairly primitive and led to my finding a far superior program.

One final piece of advice is real simple, if you are currently using WindowsME
or Windows2000 with no problems, upgrading to WindowsXP will accomplish
nothing for you except a bite out of your pocketbook.   WindowsXP is what
Windows95 should have been if Microsoft had spent a little more time writing
better code years ago.

      Bob Wright
The NOSPIN Group
http://freepctech.com

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