Upgrade Home to Pro question

[JayD]

I just purchased a computer with XP home (w/service pack 2). The
computer came w/ Norton/McAfee preinstalled. No disks, but I made
"restore disks" first thing out of the box. My brother gave me a sealed
XP Pro from 3 years ago. If I use it to upgrade my computer to XP Pro,
will the SP 2 still work?

 

[Tim Slattery]

I just purchased a computer with XP home (w/service pack 2). The
computer came w/ Norton/McAfee preinstalled. No disks, but I made
"restore disks" first thing out of the box. My brother gave me a sealed
XP Pro from 3 years ago. If I use it to upgrade my computer to XP Pro,
will the SP 2 still work?

If you try to use that CD to upgrade your system, you'll probably get
a message to the effect that it can't be done because the system being
upgraded is a later version than the disk doing the upgrading.

The solution is to use the XP Pro CD to create a new CD with SP2
slipstreamed in. Look here:
http://www.winsupersite.com/showcase/windowsxp_sp2_slipstream.asp for
a discussion of that, or Google for it.

 

[Ken Blake]

In

I just purchased a computer with XP home (w/service pack 2).
The
computer came w/ Norton/McAfee preinstalled. No disks, but I
made
"restore disks" first thing out of the box. My brother gave me
a
sealed XP Pro from 3 years ago. If I use it to upgrade my
computer to
XP Pro, will the SP 2 still work?

Almost certainly, you won't be able to do an upgrade with it, at
least not directly.

First of all, what kind of CD is it: Full, Upgrade, or OEM? If
it's OEM, be aware that OEM CDs don't do upgrades at all, only
clean installations.

Second, if it's a Full or Upgrade, you can do an upgrade with it,
but because it's three years old and therefore without SP2, if
you try to upgrade over your SP2 version, it will fail with a
message that you are trying to apply an older version over a
newer one.

The solution is to create a slipstreamed version of XP
Professional, including SP2, and use it. See
http://forum.aumha.org/viewtopic.php?t=7262

But 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.
For details go to

http://www.winsupersite.com/showcase/windowsxp_home_pro.asp

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/whichxp.asp

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/home/howtobuy/choosing2.asp

Also note that Professional allows ten concurrent network
connections, and Home only five.