Upgrade Question XP

[marcusdavid]

Hi gang,

My scenario is that I am a musician who is currently running WIN 2000 Pro, and I have a studio with several software programs (music creation and production - Cubase, Reason, FL Studio etc) running along with tons of VST instruments and plug-ins that work with the software. I have a decent system, not great.. not terrible.

It looks something like this.

P4 3.2GHz Processor
Intel 925 chipset
800MHz FSB
2GB Dual Channel DDR RAM
80GB System SATA
200GB Media SATA

I have just upgraded my main interface (the mother ship of my studio, if you will) and recently discovered that I need XP. I cannot run a dual boot because I need the programs and plug-ins to all access each other.

My question is, can I upgrade to XP without causing various other programs I have installed to stop working? How can I know without learning the hard way?

Any experience, advise or just general thought on any area of this quandary would be GREATLY appreciated!

marcus

 

[brendandonhu]

You can get an upgrade CD to go from 2000 Pro to XP Pro but there's a pretty good chance that programs will need to be reinstalled. I would just plan on removing everything and installing XP from scratch.

 

[marcusdavid]

Yikes! that can't be right... there are waay too many programs that my Dad installed on the hard drive when he built the computer for me, that I don't have the discs for. And he is in Illinios.

Please tell me there is another answer.. someone.. ANYONE??

 

[Old Rich]

If you use an upgrade version of XP Professional, you should be able to install it on top of Win2000 Pro . . the operative word here is "should" . . there is some chance it will not and you will then have to do a clean install. The call is yours. I would back up any data you care for before doing that.

This article from Microsoft is for SP2, but is a good guide to preparing for the upgrade you are considering

 

[inuyasha320]

if you have extra hard drive space, you can use a program like partition magic to backup the drive c partition just incase anything goes wrong, you will have the problem ficed is like 5 mintues

the upgrade should work with out you having to loose your files but back them up just incase.

 

[Rich-M]

Windows 2000 is about the only OS that an upgrade can work, but what I would do is make a partition as suggested and use a program like Ghost or Acronis True Image to make an image file to that partition in case something goes wrong you can always go back.

 

[crjdriver]

I agree. Use acronis to make an image of your disk as it is now. Store it on an external, dvdrs, or whatever. Once that is done, then go ahead and do the upgrade. If it does not work out for you, it is a simple matter to restore the image. Depending on the size and speed of the media, it can take as little as 5min to restore a system.

 

[marcusdavid]

Thank you everyone for your advice and expertise in this matter. May it return to you a hundred fold!

Marcus

 

[kiwiguy]

Xp also has a "compatability wizard" that will analyse what hardware and software is installed and advise what will need reinstalling, and what will not work. This is run before any upgrade.

I have found it to be quite accurate.

 

[bbearren]

I have a system that began life as Windows 95 OSR2. Over the course of the years I did an upgrade over that installation to Windows 98, installed a home network, did an upgrade over that installation to Windows 2000 Pro, did a hardware upgrade within that installation of mobo, processor, and memory, did a reinstall of Windows 2000 Pro over all that (to get all the hardware changes fully installed), and finally did an upgrade to Windows XP Pro SP2 over all of that. Everything works. I did backups along the way, and later disk images, before each major change, (I've upgraded hard drives a number of times) but didn't have to use them. I use BootItNG for imaging. It lets you browze the image and recover individual files if you want.