Upgrading to Windows 95 to XP

[Tom Porterfield]

You cannot upgrade *over* Win95 at all; it is not accepted by setup
as a sound base. But you can use a Win95 CD as evidence of
entitlement to do a clean install with the Upgrade CD. The
presumption I think was that there are very few Win95 machines that
would be capable of running XP, so that the extensions of setup to
handle upgrading over it were not justified (especially as Win95
might be on a FAT 16 partition)

Yes, quite right. Memory failure there. Windows 95 media will satisfy
the upgrade verification check, but you can't do an upgrade of a Windows
95 installation. Thanks for clarification Alex.
--
Tom Porterfield
MS-MVP MCE
http://support.telop.org

Please post all follow-ups to the newsgroup only.

 

[Susan]

Organization has Gateway with Windows 95 software. It was upgraded to
Windows 98. There are no Windows 98 cds. Therefore is not legal in
Microsoft's eyes! Cannot purchase 98 software from Microsoft. Cannot upgrade
to XP Pro--would not handle it. Therefore Microsoft Chariable Open License
program is of no value here. It was suggested I try Microsoft.com/giving
but that only applies to donated computers. This computer was purchased by
organization. Microsoft person suggested OEM software purchase but then I am
not a builder. So that is not legal. Guess once a pirate always a pirate
unless buy new computer with legal software. Don't just trust yellow pages
local ad!

P.S. I did not upgrade the software. I was not around. No one seems to know
who did. Maybe it was James who has worked on the computers in the past and
recently tried to sell computer with hard disk loaded pirated Windows XP Pro
software to the organization. I reported it to Microsoft! Also McAfee
antivirus was not installed on computer but was on the invoice. I got
antivirus loaded now and running. God must be watching over us, because
there was no antivirus software running on it since February 17 and it was
clean!

 

[Alex Nichol]

Organization has Gateway with Windows 95 software. It was upgraded to
Windows 98. There are no Windows 98 cds. Therefore is not legal in
Microsoft's eyes! Cannot purchase 98 software from Microsoft. Cannot upgrade
to XP Pro--would not handle it.

Although you cannot upgrade over Win95, the Win95 CD (provided it is a
proper one, not one of the 'restore' ones without a Win95 folder of .cab
files) *is* recognised as a qualifying product if you do a clean install
of XP with an Upgrade CD, and show it the Win95 CD as the evidence.

 

[Guest]

----- Susan wrote: ----

Can Windows 95 be upgraded to Windows XP Pro? EULA for
Upgrade Advisor does not specify Windows 95. Guess it must
be 98 or above

 

[Michael Solomon \(MS-MVP Windows Shell/User\)]

An upgrade directly over 95 is not supported and usually will halt before
setup. If your system is old enough to have had Windows 95 installed
originally, you would likely not be satisfied with results of an XP
installation. First, XP is very graphics intensive but even with all the
eye candy turned off, unless you have a pretty fast system and a lot of ram,
at least 256MB, it's going to be pretty slow.

All the hardware on the system would need updating or, at the very least you
would need to determine if there are XP drivers available for all your
devices. You would also need to check if your software was XP compatible.
For the most part, most of it will run but any utilities, antivirus,
firewalls and CD burning apps would have to be replaced with XP compatible
versions as older versions of these apps won't work on XP and in some case
will break or otherwise corrupt setup.

 

[Ken Blake, MVP]

In

Can Windows 95 be upgraded to Windows XP Pro? EULA for
Upgrade Advisor does not specify Windows 95. Guess it must
be 98 or above?

That depends on what you mean. You can not directly upgrade over
the top of Windows 95. However you can use a Windows 95 CD as
proof of ownership of a previous qualifying version to do a clean
installation with the Upgrade Version.

 

[Alex Nichol]

----- Susan wrote: -----

Can Windows 95 be upgraded to Windows XP Pro? EULA for
Upgrade Advisor does not specify Windows 95. Guess it must
be 98 or above?

You cannot upgrade Win95 to XP: but the Win95 CD (apart from some OEM
restore ones) will serve as evidence for doing a clean install of XP
using the Upgrade CD. Also read Gary Woodruff`s article on Files and
settings Transfer at http://aumha.org/win5/a/fast.htm