Re: UPGRADING/Dual-Boot/Migration - anything to avoid a clean start. help?

Tech-Archive recommends: Repair Windows Errors & Optimize Windows Performance

From: GTS (x)
Date: 09/10/04 

Date: Thu, 9 Sep 2004 22:25:44 -0400

The advice to do a clean install rather than an upgrade often has a
knee-jerk aspect (especially when bundled with the recommendations to
reformat the drive first. This makes no sense at all as there's nothing to
lose then by trying the upgrade.)
If your machine is clean and stable and you check out compatibility issues
first, the odds are excellent that an XP upgrade will work just fine. (It
did in the many upgrade installations I ran for clients.) A full backup is,
of course, always a wise precaution.

Dual boot installations (assuming you have an available partition) are
straightforward, but you will still have to reinstall most apps. Migration
tools can have some value, but limited. There's no reason the Win 98
partition should "rot" or fail later, though you'll find it becomes a chore
to keep both up to date as time goes on and you rarely use the 98 anymore. 

-- 
"Jeff W" <msnews@Kwcpa.com> wrote in message 
news:ugMhY2plEHA.3756@TK2MSFTNGP11.phx.gbl...
> Hi - There have been some opinions posted that if I'm moving from
> WIN98SE to XP, I should do a clean install.  Like motherhood, this is
> hard to argue against.  But my WIN98SE machine is well-maintained (i
> installed all SW myself, I keep it clean of unneeded or rogue apps, I
> run adaware and scandisk daily, and Mcafee continually, etc)., it's
> quite stable, and the time it would take to manually re-install ALL my
> apps and migrate over all my data files, and make sure everything works,
> would be measured in days.   So I see two options
>
> 1) Upgrade - is this really such a bad idea for a sophisticated user?
> Upgrade Advisor found virtually no problems, and from reading "...Inside
> out", it looks like Msoft went to a lot of effort to make this work.
>
> 2) Setup a dual boot, and re-install the apps I use a lot (if they need
> it). This seems less painful than starting over, and gives me an 'out'
> if an old app won't run.  The way I understand it - I don't need
> multiple copies of the apps.  Some (that don't rely much on the windows
> directory or registry), will just run.   Some might run but revert to
> default values (since they're referencing a different O/S folder and
> registry) and some may require re-installation (but the data files will
> stay put).   So this is sort of a new O/S (that I have to re-setup my
> environment manually, a small pain), without re-installing ALL the apps.
>
> 2b) Are the migration tools mentioned in "...inside out" of any use
> here?  For example, XP hs one that will  save settings of most apps
> before the XP install, and then restore them (on the same machine)?
> would that work with the dual-boot approach?
>
> finally - if I set up dual-boot - will the WIN98SE setup suffer from
> 'software rot' - i.e., a year from now I'll try to boot and for some
> reason it won't work?
>
> thanks!
> /j

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