you may not have the opportunity
for a clean install.
instead you will likely upgrade the
current o.s. on the disk to vista, thus
overwriting your winxp.
however, something to keep in
mind is that although you can
upgrade your system, your winxp
peripherals, like printers, scanners,
etc, may not be compatible without
an update from their maker(s).
secondly, though your system
is upgradeable to vista are your
system resources marginal or
ideal for running vista?
meaning that although your system
may have enough ram and disk
space and cpu power to run winxp
very well, your current hardware
may need further upgrading, else
the vista o.s. may be slow and
sluggish.
then another thing is that if you
download an electronic upgrade
of vista, you won't have any repair
disks.
therefore if vista doesn't install correctly
on the first try "or" you do install it but
get overwhelmed by vista complexities
and you modify a setting, then the pc may
become unbootable and require disks to
repair it.
perhaps you may decide to uninstall vista
and then the question is do you have disks for
winxp or do you simply have restoration disks
that restore the machine back to its out of the
box state?
finally, in regards to your backup question,
you might want to use a program
called drive image xml and avoid the
built in windows backup.
the program will create an image
of your system and divide up into
cd size files, but you have to
select the option to create small
files or it will simply make one
giant image/backup file.
you create these small files onto the
disk in a folder called something like
backup and from that folder you can
copy the images onto cd's.
if you have a d drive then you
can store your images to this location,
as the c drive will be the one having
the focus of your attention.
------------
at this time i would forego
the upgrade until you conduct
some more research.
lookup your printers, scanners,
etc at the manufacturer's website
and see if they are vista ready or
if there are updates.
however, some manufacturers would
prefer to sell vista ready peripherals
instead of expending costs for making
and providing free updates.
finally check out the vista upgrade
advisor program that is available
at microsoft.com and it will give
you additional details about your
system that its' seller may not
have fully disclosed to you.
--
db·´¯`·...¸><)))º>
DatabaseBen, Retired Professional
- Systems Analyst
- Database Developer
- Accountancy
- Veteran of the Armed Forces
