I've spent a good part of my weekend time upgrading from WIN 98 to XP PRO and have some advice for anyone who takes this on so they won't lose all their fishing time trying to get it up and running.
1) make a win98 or WINME boot disk. Go to wwwbootdisk.com if you need to and get the OEM version (loads ram).
2) disconect your internet access.
3) The first thing XP does is run a report and tells you about all the stuff that's incompatible. Most of this is untrue. For instance my sound card was incompatible but amazingly it works fine. Glad I didn't buy another one.
4) do not choose dynamic upgrade. Dynamic upgrade will go out to Microsofts sight and grab upgrades as it needs them. However, the XP upgrade disables your firewall and anti virus. So I picked up the sasser virus and two others during upgrade.
5) XP upgrade assigns a random password during setup and is supposed to remove it when complete. however it doesn't always and Microsoft is aware of the problem. If it doesn't remove the random password you are locked out of your PC. Can't get into windows at all. Can't do a recover either. This is where you need the boot disk.
Modify your BIOS to boot from the floppy drive before the hard drive. Put the floopy in and then boot up and choose to boot from the disk. At the prompt type in
C:\ edit windows\setupact.log and look for "random password". Write this down exactly (caps/no caps).
Now reboot from the hard drive and use the password. First thing change the password to your own. Now re-install your firewall and ant-virus. Do a full scan. hook up your internet connection and go out and get the windows updates.
Run another scan. You should be good to go.
This should save you a lot of headaches.
_________________________
"You learn more from losing than you do from winning." Lou Pinella
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