Re: XP Home to XP Pro 'Upgrade' Question

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Bob wrote:
First let me set the stage -- I am a member of a local ski patrol group and about 2.5 years ago we purchased a laptop for the group. We use it for training and presentations as well as part of our network of PCs to administrate our annual Ski Swap. Shortly after we had bought the laptop, we upgraded it from XP Home to XP Pro (actually we have a full version of XP Pro that we did the upgrade with). Now skip forward in time to the present -- The "old" laptop has died and we have decided to purchase a new one (actually have the new laptop in hand).

My questions:
1.) Can I use the full version of XP Pro to upgrade the new laptop from XP Home? Since the Old laptop in now dead, can I install this full package on the new machine. This is not the OS that came with the old lap top but a full package that we purchased, but it was installed / activated on the old lap top 2.5 years ago. We need > 5 network connections for our ski swap (actually we need 6) and XP Home limits you to 5 simultaneous connections, that is why I need to upgrade it to XP Pro.

Yes, you can use the full version to do the upgrade. It will install and activate without problems.

2.) Hints on how to go about the upgrade? I put the CD in the new lap top and tried to run it and got an error (The version of Windows on the CD is older than the version currently installed on the PC) Can do the upgrade without loosing all of the files and programs already loaded on the new laptop?

OK, so almost without problems. Here the issue is that the new laptop came with either SP1, or more likely SP2, installed. Your XP Pro disk is either without any SP or at least a lower SP than is already installed. You'll want to download the full install of SP2 and then slipstream that with your XP Pro CD. There are a number of free tools that make that process pretty simple. One that I use is nLite from http://www.nliteos.com/nlite.html.
--
Tom Porterfield
MS-MVP Windows
http://support.telop.org

Please post all follow-ups to the newsgroup only.
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