Change from XP Home to XP Pro

[Guest]

My system is currently XP Home and I want to install XP Professional. Can I
do this with the XP Pro installation disc? It is not an upgrade. Will I
lose any current files in the change over?

Thanks for your assistance

 

[Harry Ohrn]

A full retail version of XP will do upgrades. OEM versions will not.
Yes you can upgrade from XP Home to Pro. Boot to your XP Home Desktop with
an account that has administrator privileges. Simply pop your XP Pro Full
retail version into the drive from the Windows Home Desktop and click
Install->Upgrade[recommended]. There is no uninstall option though.

You need to plan for success when doing any upgrade even though the
smoothest is likely when one upgrades from Home to Pro. Remember that no
upgrade is 100% safe even though this is likely to be 99.99% likely to
succeed you should still backup critical data. I generally make a full
system backup with an imaging program like Aconis TrueImage or Norton Ghost
first. That way if something goes amiss I can quickly revert back to my
previous setup.

Make certain you clean up your system before upgrading. Run a spyware
cleaner or two, turn off System Restore (the points won't survive the
upgrade anyway), do a thorough disk cleanup, empty the recycle bin, run
defrag then turn off antivirus software and disconnect scanners, printers,
cameras and non-essential peripherals.

If you have a CD-R/W drive you might consider creating a slipstream of SP2
into the XP Pro CD before running the upgrade. There is a nifty tool called
"nlite" that will easily facilitate that for you
http://www.msfn.org/articles.php?action=show&showarticle=49 Follow the
instructions and you will have a bootable Windows XP Pro SP2 CD to work
with. Save loads of time after you do the upgrade. Download SP2 from here
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/...be-3b8e-4f30-8245-9e368d3cdb5a&displaylang=en

 

[Ken Blake]

In

My system is currently XP Home and I want to install XP
Professional.
Can I do this with the XP Pro installation disc? It is not an
upgrade.

You can do it with either the XP Professional Full or Upgrade
version. You can *not* do an upgrade with the XP Professional OEM
version.

Will I lose any current files in the change over?

By definition, an "upgrade" (as opposed to a clean installation)
means that all data, programs, etc. are kept intact.

However there are no guarantees that it always works perfectly.
However unlikely, it's always possible that something might go
wrong. For that reason it's prudent to be sure you have a backup
of anything you can't afford to lose before beginning.

Are you sure you want to do this? Are you aware that XP Home and
Professional are identical except that Professional includes a
few features (mostly related to security and networking) missing
from Home? Most home users don't need and would never use these
extra features and will see no benefits by upgrading.