Upgrading XP from Home to Professional

[NS]

I wish to upgrade from XP Home to XP Professional. Will all the settings,
files and applications used on Home migrate to Professional and is it
recommended that the upgrade be done without removing Home?

Norman Schwartz
www.nsapc.com

 

[Steve C. Ray]

You should have no problem with the upgrade. If you remove Home (do a clean
install) you will lose all your settings, data and added programs, so just
insert the Pro upgrade and do a upgrade.
Before you do this, is there a special need for Pro? Home and Pro are
basically the same, but Pro does have some features that Home doesn't. As
far as normal operation you won't see any difference.

 

[Guest]

-----Original Message-----
I wish to upgrade from XP Home to XP Professional. Will all the settings,
files and applications used on Home migrate to Professional and is it
recommended that the upgrade be done without removing Home?

Norman Schwartz
www.nsapc.com

if you do not need the security or connect to a domain

or use remote desktop it is a potential quagmire with no
positive accomplishment at the end.

if a desktop you can upgrade with good success but
laptops often has problems with drivers and best to
gather drivers from oem site before trying install and
then perform a clean install.

you can try the upgrade if you have a desktop and if
errors stop you do a clean installation.

 

[NS]

The file encryption feature of Professional is of interest.

Norman Schwartz
www.nsapc.com

 

[Alex Nichol]

I wish to upgrade from XP Home to XP Professional. Will all the settings,
files and applications used on Home migrate to Professional and is it
recommended that the upgrade be done without removing Home?

You do it by running the XP Pro CD from the existing Home system. Start
INstall, continue with Upgrade.

While you should always ensure you have backups of critical data, just
in case, the installed software and settings will be retained: some
visual effects and the like (eg wallpaper, and settings in System. . . .
Visual effects) will revert to default

 

[Ken Blake, MVP]

In

I wish to upgrade from XP Home to XP Professional. Will all the
settings, files and applications used on Home migrate to Professional


Yes.


and is it recommended that the upgrade be done without removing

Home?


Yes.

This is the easiest and most likely successful of all possible
upgrades. However be aware that it's *always* possible for
something to go wrong. If, for example, you lose power at the
wrong time, you could lose everything. So it's always prudent to
be sure you have a backup of anything you can't afford to lose
before beginning.

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.