Running Windows 98 on one pc, its just been upgraded and I think windows is due to an upgrade upto XP.

I if upgrade it from windows 98 to XP, will I lose any programs or documents on the hard drive?

Cheers

No - But some may not work. Stuff like MS Office will be ok, you may need to re-install third pty apps and games.

Having installed and upgraded hundred of XP machines i highly reccomend that you do not do an upgrade. Do a frash install.

Secondly what is you comp,

Make sure that you have at least a 256meg of ram, minimum of 600megahertz and a resonably good graphics card if you are going to run it in XP mode. (Ram being the most important of the lot, 512 is really what you want)

Back up all your docs and do a clean install, the only time i would ever suggest an upgrade is from 2000 to XP because they are similar in design.

Please ask if you need any help.

[Edited by churchwa - 3/30/2003 1:21:27 PM]

The computer is a Pentium 4 2G, 512 RAM, 64MB graphics card.

It will be hard to backup all the files on my pc, theres names in the address book, programs that I dont have the disks to, documnets that I need, etc. Thats why I thought an upgrade would be easier.

Address books are easy to back up. If you are using Outlook then just copy outlook.pst and backup.pst. I don't understand how you have such a powerful computer and only have 98 on it anyway.

The software is another issue, i don't know what to say about that, but you will have no end of problems if you try to upgrade from 98 to xp.

But even if you do upgrade then most of your software will not work anyway and you will have a pig of a machine.

well basically we had a Pentium 3 700 and we got rid of that and got a new M/board, RAM, and processor but we carried on using the old hard drive as its quite big and had all the files we need. The old PC ran on on windows 98.

Right, i suggest that you buy a new HD which runs at ata133 and use that for a clean install and your main drive. Then use the other one to store all your document files on. This will increase the overall speed of your computer, and mean you get to keep all your files.

[Edited by churchwa - 3/30/2003 3:55:25 PM]

ok cheers

though whats ata133?

ata133 is the speed at which you ide bus operates. Now nearly all new ide hard drives operate at that speed (as do all motherboards) But as you are using your old Hard drive from your old machine it is most likly that it is running at ata66, thus not fully utilising the bandwidth on the computer. Buy purchasing an ata133 hard drive you will effectivly be doubling the through put to your computer. In the real world it will only probably be about 40% increase in HD speed but it all helps. Get a HD with 8meg of cache on it.