Battle of the XP Pro and XP Home

[Guest]

I bought a computer with XP Pro loaded. Recently discovered that the XP Pro
is not "legal" so I went and bought XP Home (all I needed anyway). Loaded XP
Home but now when the computer starts up I get the choice to either run XP
Home in safe mode or XP Pro as before. Bascially I want to run with XP Home
and discard XP Pro so that I am legal and can register for updates etc. Err,
what should I do?

 

[Mike Hall \(MS-MVP\)]

Mike

Your best plan is to start over.. save whatever important files and
documents that have been accumulated, and then use the XP Home CD to
reformat the drive, re-installing XP Home directly after..

 

[Guest]

Thanks Mike. I'll give it a go, but when I reload everything back on might I
reload the conflict again?

Mike

 

[Mike Hall \(MS-MVP\)]

Mike

Not if you delete the partitions on the drive.. nothing will be left..

However, when booting after the new load, you will probably get a choice of
'Previous Operating System' or Windows XP Home.. if this happens, you can
edit the boot.ini file to remove the offending choice after having completed
the re-installation..

For more on editing the 'boot.ini' file..

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;289022&sd=tech

Report back to this thread and tell us how you fared..