Upgrading WinXP Home to WinXP Pro

[time]

Has anyone done this?

I'm planning to fly to another country and upgrade a Compaq laptop running XP Home. With the multitude of drivers involved, I wonder if there's an easy way to just upgrade rather than wiping it and installing from scratch?

 

[LunarMist]

I once upgraded my Fujitsu from XP to XPP. It was fine, but a couple of the default drivers were overwritten and had to be downloaded.

 

[Handruin]

I didn't think it was possible, so i went searching for the upgrade paths here. If I'm reading their chart correctly, it looks like a supported upgrade path. I have not tried it, so I can't relate any experiences.

 

[Buck]

I've had customer's go the opposite direction and wonder why they can't access their dynamic disk anymore.

 

[LunarMist]

:lol: :lol: :lol:

 

[sechs]

It's just like doing an "upgrade" install of the Windows over itself... only you'll lose all of the XP Home dysfunctionalities.

 

[Tannin]

On the other hand, you'll still be faced ith all that complete crap that Compaq load into their systems. Can you be really sure thatyou've got rid of it and have a stable, reliable system? Especially given that you won't be there in person to support it if something goes wrong.

I'd play it safe: clean install. If you can, clean install with format.

 

[time]

Sechs, I assume you're referring to an OEM copy of Pro? If so, I'm cheered.

Tannin, now you've depressed me. Gathering and reinstalling all the random goop to make a 'name-brand' laptop go is not one of my favourite past-times. I'd guess a couple of hours if all goes well.

On top of this, there's finding and backing up all their data etc and restoring it later.

All this so the laptop can access a server occasionally.

To be fair, if they were local, I wouldn't mind at all. I'd have plenty of internet-connected machines to fall back on for advice and software. If I hit a roadblock, I'd just go and do something else for a while until the urge to Kill The Compaq eased. Unfortunately, experience tells me to expect the worst with this type of situation.

 

[Tannin]

Hey, how bad can it be?

You need drivers for:

* video
* network card
* modem
* sound card
* PCMCIA (possibly)

Finding and loading them sounds a lot easier than buggerising about with an over the top install on a system that is virtually certain to have all sorts of Compaq-specific crap loaded, and more than likely has the usual bucketload of spyware waiting to trip you up with something subtle.

The only thing that makes me worry is that it is a Compaq, and if there is one big-name company I don't trust to have ordinary standard basic device drivers on their website, it's Compaq. Often, they don't even give you drivers on CD, just a pox-ridden recovery CD. Or, even worse, an utterly shonky restore partition.

But, given that there are only two ways to do this and you have to take your chances one way or another, I guess you just have to choose your poison. Good luck!

Me, I'll take $10 on red.

(Actually, come to think of it, I'd upgrade them to the best of all Windows versions: 2000 SP4. I hate trying to make bloody XP (any flavour) talk to a network. Networking XP is poison, pure and simple.)

 

[time]

There's also bound to be a keyboard driver to make some of the extra buttons work, and possibly a power management driver. And maybe 'common libraries' etc, a la Toshiba. There wil also be several different versions of each, with little or no explanation about which should be chosen (confirmed).

When I search HP's site with the model number, it comes up with a bunch of HP printers.

When I go for the series (Compaq 700), it says "Maximum number of matches exceeded" (or something like that).

Going through the country-specific site instead, and narrowing it down to Compaq 700 Presario (a guess), there are only 131 models to choose from, each with their own combination of drivers and utilities. The first one I tried didn't even have any drivers.

I wish I could blame everything bad about HP on Carly, but life just ain't that simple. :roll:

 

[MaxBurn]

I have had lots of customers buy something off the shelf with XP home and then pay us to install the retail XP Pro, which is just pop in the disk and let it run. Yeah it's expensive but it worked fine for them. Personally I would do a clean install though.

 

[time]

Yeah, I know the retail version will work, but what about the OEM version?

 

[sechs]

Why wouldn't it work? Is there something inherently different, other than the key?

 

[time]

With older versions of Windows (don't know about Win2k, but Win98 anyway), the OEM key will not allow you to perform an upgrade, whereas the full retail version will. I'm hoping M$ left this particular piece of bastardry behind.

 

[Groltz]

Late Newz: Hack can upgrade XP Home to XP Pro Lite