Retail XP Pro wSP2 and SecTools to OEM W2K Pro upgrade to OEMWinME

[Guest]

Bought a Dell 8100 with WinME OEM and W2K upgrade for dual booting years back.
Running P4 1 GB RD-RAM 800MHZ..Just before XP was released..needed working
box. They told me it'd handle XP Pro when it happened. Was given what was
thought to be Full Retail Version of XP Pro w SP 2 and "security tools". but
it turns out to be an upgrade to W2K or WinME. Will it recognize Dell's OEM
W2K upgrade to Dell's OEM WinME? Will it leave me cursed to having remnants
of one or both previous versions of the OS living on the hard drive? Or will
it validate from either disk by inserting them in the hard drive like
upgrades to Adobe Photoshop do? One or 2 final questions. If I want the most
documentation, administrative and support tools for XP Pro, will I get the
same on the upgrade disk (plus what downloads MSDN/Technet offer) as I would
with the full retail original version? Important as I support other computers
of my own, and have a business doing that. Finally, I'm waiting for the oems
to finish Oking Vista so I can buy a Vista box with the full retail version
of the species of choice and would like to dual boot the XP Pro with Vista.
Any advice, especially from one of the MVPs would be most appreciated. This
farmer wants advice before he removes the plastic from the crop.:0|
TIA,
Howard Dobel (AKA InsaneEyeDoctor but gone from AOL)
(e-mail address removed) best choice
(e-mail address removed) in a pinch
"I'll be back"

 

[Guest]

If you have the space on the hd,those OS are compatable with each other,ME
is one you could do without however...

 

[Guest]

Thankyou Andrew, for your thought and time. I had an anomolous esperience
with ME, worked fine on this big factory box with all the RAM it could hold.
A few tweaks here and there, and I was fairly happy. But I took it off my box
a long time ago as everything that was anything to me was W2K and the 9x
security holes convinced me. OK, I'm ready to archive to CD, backup boot
partition, registry, repair disk, backsup of backups etc and give her a
whirl. Hope I'm lucky, will use every I can. HmmmmmMaybe make a 2nd active
partition w/w2k. Should be plenty of room. If XP goes well and new HD program
makes 200 GB visible to machine, should have room anything coming down the
pike. Boy, you might be able to return hardware w/ lottsa beggin, but once
wrapper is off software, well.....