XP Home to XP pro ?

[RJK]

Can I "upgrade," my XP Home installation to XP Pro 2002, (that I've just
bought), with a "repair install," or have I got to start from scratch and
sit here for a week ! ?

regards, Richard

 

[Gordon]

Can I "upgrade," my XP Home installation to XP Pro 2002, (that I've just
bought), with a "repair install," or have I got to start from scratch and
sit here for a week ! ?

regards, Richard

No, you can upgrade.
But why would you want to, other than if you need to join a Domain?

 

[Alias]

Can I "upgrade," my XP Home installation to XP Pro 2002, (that I've just
bought), with a "repair install," or have I got to start from scratch and
sit here for a week ! ?

regards, Richard

"Sitting for a week" will be worth it, although I can't imagine a clean
install taking that long unless you're installing hundreds of programs.

Any particular reason you want to upgrade?

Alias

 

[Tim Slattery]

Can I "upgrade," my XP Home installation to XP Pro 2002, (that I've just
bought), with a "repair install," or have I got to start from scratch

It should be an upgrade, not a repair install. If there's no upgrade
option, then maybe you bought an OEM disk, which can't do an upgrade.

 

[RJK]

Thanx, ...I thought that a necessary component for "Remote Assistance" was
included in XP Pro but, not in XP Home ed.
i.e. with XP Pro I can "remote assist" a remote XP Home platform but, not
the other way around.

regards, Richard

 

[RJK]

Thanx, ...I thought that a necessary component for "Remote Assistance" was
included in XP Pro but, not in XP Home ed.
i.e. with XP Pro I can "remote assist" a remote XP Home platform but, not
the other way around.

regards, Richard

 

[RJK]

Thanx, I did buy XP Pro OEM, ...and was hoping I could "repair install" :-(

also ...I thought that a necessary component for "Remote Assistance" was
included in XP Pro but, not in XP Home ed.
i.e. with XP Pro I can "remote assist" a remote XP Home platform but, not
the other way around.

regards, Richard

 

[Gordon]

Thanx, ...I thought that a necessary component for "Remote Assistance" was
included in XP Pro but, not in XP Home ed.
i.e. with XP Pro I can "remote assist" a remote XP Home platform but, not
the other way around.

Do you mean remote desktop? if so, then yes you need Pro. However, you
can use remote assistance with Home, because it uses Windows messenger...

 

[Colin Barnhorst]

That's correct. However you do not upgrade with a repair install. Start XP
Home, insert the XP Pro cd at the desktop and click Upgrade on the splash
screen.

 

[Colin Barnhorst]

No. Both the edition and service pack level must agree (hard disk and cd)
in order to do a repair install. My earlier reply assumed you had purchased
a retail upgrade edition.

You do understand that the OEM license you purchased will not be
transferrable to a new computer?

 

[RJK]

Thanks again,

....I did mean XP's "Remote Desktop," as opposed to 3rd party " Remote * "
application programs.
The OEM license for the XP Pro I've bought, hasn't been installed into a PC
yet !
....so when the mood takes me, I may install it from scratch. It really does
take quite a long time to tweak up a fresh install, into the way one like
it, ...even "piling everything back in from 2nd hd" !! there MS updates,
and codecs, considerable no, of programs to install and I have all the
updates for them on 2nd hd, but, a "fresh" installation always feels quite
nice, after the effort

regards, Richard

 

[Ken Blake, MVP]

Can I "upgrade," my XP Home installation to XP Pro 2002, (that I've just
bought),

Yes, if you bought a Full or Upgrade version. No, if you've bought an
OEM reason. OEM versions do not do upgrades of any kind.

with a "repair install,"

No, you don't do a repair installation. You do an upgrade
installation.

May I ask why you want to do this? Before you get concerned with the
details of how to do this, perhaps you should revisit the question of
*whether* to do it. Why do you want to? What do you hope to gain?

Are you aware that XP Professional and XP Home are exactly the same in
all respects, except that Professional has a few features (mostly
related to networking and security) missing from Home. For most (but
not all) home users, even those with a home network, these features
aren't needed, would never be used, and buying Professional instead of
Home is a waste of money.

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 one other point not mentioned on any of those sites:
Professional allows ten concurrent network connections, and Home only
five.

 

[RJK]

Thanks Ken

....as mentioned earlier in this thread, I want to set up XPs' "Remote
Desktop," to help out a few people with basic tasks, I'm now coming to
realise that I will have to install afresh due to having bought OEM XP Pro

....this will take a weekend !!! all those myriad tiny little things like
dropping a new msvp hosts file into etc, hardening up for internet, tweaking
codecs, and reinstalling progs. and prog. updates at speed from 2nd hd,
where I keep everything, will take several hours !!! ...I may have to
treat myself to a bottle of wine to help the procedure along !

regards, Richard

 

[Colin Barnhorst]

Have you thought about doing this in a virtual machine on your XP Home
desktop? Of course it depends on how much ram you presently have now.

Thanks Ken

...as mentioned earlier in this thread, I want to set up XPs' "Remote
Desktop," to help out a few people with basic tasks, I'm now coming to
realise that I will have to install afresh due to having bought OEM XP Pro

...this will take a weekend !!! all those myriad tiny little things like
dropping a new msvp hosts file into etc, hardening up for internet,
tweaking codecs, and reinstalling progs. and prog. updates at speed from
2nd hd, where I keep everything, will take several hours !!! ...I may
have to treat myself to a bottle of wine to help the procedure along !

regards, Richard

 

[RJK]

Thanks Colin,

To be more specific, (I do love moaning, ever such a lot, when faced with a
fresh XP install, as you may have gathered!).
Even though I can work at a terrific rate of knots knocking things into the
shape I want them, it's simply the very large number of small tweaks,
adjustments, driver installs, etc, i.e. ...personalising / making settings,
the offline and online defrags, temporarily fixing the paging file min. and
max. size to 1.5 time amount of ram to stop Windows altering it for a while,
Doug Knox's vbs script to kill messenger, printer drivers, ....all these
little things ...okay an hour, or two, or three ...prolly more like 4 or 5
!!!
THEN, despite having done all that, and across the next few weeks, almost
EVERY time one goes to the PC to perform a task something is not quite
right, or is not "in there," and one spends time further adjusting or
tweaking, or installing and further tweaking, and the task is abandoned !
i.e. even after attempting the most thorough "re-install" from scratch,
....one rarely covers all the bases !
....re: setting up a virtual machine, I only have 1gb of RAM, ...not really
necessary, my hd's are quite fast and motherboard is in dual channel memory
mode, i.e "old" D935 cpu is quite swift i.e. the machine is pretty
responsive ,.....it's just the "dread" of reinstalling from scratch !

regards, Richard

Have you thought about doing this in a virtual machine on your XP Home
desktop? Of course it depends on how much ram you presently have now.

 

[Ken Blake, MVP]

Thanks Ken

You're welcome. Glad to help.

...as mentioned earlier in this thread, I want to set up XPs' "Remote
Desktop," to help out a few people with basic tasks, I'm now coming to
realise that I will have to install afresh due to having bought OEM XP Pro

Is it too late to return the OEM version you bought and get a retail
upgrade instead? It's usually only slightly more expensive.

...this will take a weekend !!! all those myriad tiny little things like
dropping a new msvp hosts file into etc, hardening up for internet, tweaking
codecs, and reinstalling progs. and prog. updates at speed from 2nd hd,
where I keep everything, will take several hours !!!

I understand. For many people it can be a lot more than several hours.
It would be much more for me.

...I may have to
treat myself to a bottle of wine to help the procedure along !

As much as I enjoy wine myself, I don't recommend drinking it while
doing this sort of thing. You should keep your head as clear as
possible.

regards, Richard

 

[Colin Barnhorst]

But did you understand my question? Maybe Ken can shed some advice on this
point too. I think you can do what you want to do without disturbing your
XP Home installation if you have enough memory on the box. You can install
the copy of XP Pro you just got into a virtual machine under Virtual PC 2007
(free). Then you would have a computer within a computer effect. You could
run XP Pro in a window on your XP Home desktop. You could do the things you
need XP Pro for and then just close the XP Pro virtual machine when you
don't need it.

A lot depends on your hardware but in theory at least it should work. That
would mean a hour or so to set up XP Pro and no changes at all to what you
are running now. You don't have to partition like you would dual booting
and you can work in both XP Home and XP Pro at the same time whenever you
need to.

 

[Ken Blake, MVP]

But did you understand my question? Maybe Ken can shed some advice on this
point too. I think you can do what you want to do without disturbing your
XP Home installation if you have enough memory on the box. You can install
the copy of XP Pro you just got into a virtual machine under Virtual PC 2007
(free). Then you would have a computer within a computer effect. You could
run XP Pro in a window on your XP Home desktop. You could do the things you
need XP Pro for and then just close the XP Pro virtual machine when you
don't need it.

I think that's a great suggestion for him, and should be a lot easier
than a clean reinstallation. The only problem is that I think Virtual
PC is not supported under XP Home, only Professional. I think it does
work under Home, though. I've never done it though, so if you don't
know for sure, perhaps someone else can chime in with a definitive
answer.

 

[Colin Barnhorst]

It works fine on a Home host. The "support" issue is that it is not
eligible for phone and email support from MS when run on a consumer edition
of any OS. But if a user is using a preinstalled edition of the host he is
not eligible for that support anyway.

 

[Colin Barnhorst]

And, yes, my wife uses VPC on her XP Home based laptop without issues.