How to use WinXP Pro upgrade cd to install Home Edition

[Fannygas]

Thanks in advance for reading:

On my nephew's Compaq Presario, I need to perform a clean, freshly formatted
install of Home Edition without the Compaq restoration CDs.

I have my licensed WinXP Professional upgrade CD (with MY product ID) and I
have HIS product ID which will not work with the XP upgrade. Since I have
no source files to do the XP Home install, can I use a Pro CD to do this
somehow?

(I do have the Win95 CD for the upgrade requirements).

 

[Malke]

Thanks in advance for reading:

On my nephew's Compaq Presario, I need to perform a clean, freshly
formatted install of Home Edition without the Compaq restoration CDs.

I have my licensed WinXP Professional upgrade CD (with MY product ID)
and I
have HIS product ID which will not work with the XP upgrade. Since I
have no source files to do the XP Home install, can I use a Pro CD to
do this somehow?

(I do have the Win95 CD for the upgrade requirements).

You can do a clean install with a retail full CD. Buy why would you want
to put a $300 operating system on his Compaq? Your nephew would be far
better off just paying the $25 or so to have Compaq send him the
Recovery Disks.

Malke

 

[Fannygas]

THere's a time issue here. And Compaq (HP) shows the recovery CDs are no
longer available.

 

[Malke]

THere's a time issue here. And Compaq (HP) shows the recovery CDs are
no longer available.

Then you're stuck. Go to the store and buy a full retail copy of
whichever XP version is appropriate. There is no reason to buy Pro if
your nephew doesn't need any of Pro's advanced options. You'll save
about $100 by getting Home since a full retail of Home is around $200.

You should go to Compaq/HP's website and download any drivers necessary
and put them on a cd-r first since you'll probably need to install
drivers afterwards. Compaqs tend to use proprietary hardware and while
XP does have quite a lot of built-in drivers, it obviously doesn't have
all of them for all hardware made.

Comparison Guide -
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/home/howtobuy/choosing2.mspx and
Five Editions of Windows XP Compared -
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/evaluation/compare.mspx

http://michaelstevenstech.com/cleanxpinstall.html - Clean Install

Understand that an operating system does not come with a word processor,
DVD player, etc. and any third-party software will have to be
reinstalled either from the original installation media or from
purchased programs. Restore data from backups.

Malke

 

[Ron Sommer]

Are you sure that there isn't a restore partition on the hard drive?

 

[Bruce Chambers]

Thanks in advance for reading:

On my nephew's Compaq Presario, I need to perform a clean, freshly formatted
install of Home Edition without the Compaq restoration CDs.

I have my licensed WinXP Professional upgrade CD (with MY product ID) and I
have HIS product ID which will not work with the XP upgrade. Since I have
no source files to do the XP Home install, can I use a Pro CD to do this
somehow?

No, there's no way that a WinXP Pro Upgrade CD can magically install a
different OS.


--

Bruce Chambers

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