Windows XP: Setup

After you made the decision of which package you want to install, you first have to prepare the machine for the upgrade.  If you plan to upgrade from the pre-existing version of Windows, from the report generated by the Upgrade Advisor you may want to uninstall the offending applications or hardware.  Anti-virus or any disk utilities will require a new version compatible with Windows XP.  Most applications will work perfectly once you've migrated to XP.

If you don't plan on upgrading the existing version, but rather installing from fresh then you can dual boot from your existing Windows.  You will need to partition the hard drive to either a FAT32 or NTFS format for the secondary partition.  Tools such as PowerQuest's Partition Magic 7.0 will do this job perfectly.  XP installs a boot up menu with the choices of operating systems or you can use tools provided with some partition programs.  Between FAT32 and NTFS drives, there are differences.  Windows 9x/Me can't read NTFS drives, so if you want to make Windows 9x/Me from the first boot read files from the second partition then you may want to consider FAT32.  NTFS drives do have advantages such as security, however FAT32 may be more suitable in a dual boot setup.  Also, you may want to split the drive to give XP enough space - I recommend at least 4 GB if you plan to install other applications on XP.

The third option is to format the hard drive and start from fresh.

The overall install may take 40 minutes to 2 hours depending on your system.  You may also want to gather all the XP compatible drivers in a specific location so that when the install is complete, you can install the latest version of drivers.

In our personal experiences with the XP setup, we ran into difficulties with both of our test machines.  In our first test machine, an Intel Pentium II 333 MHz with 160 MB of RAM was upgraded from Windows Me.  Near the end of the setup, the computer screen went blank - as if the video card (Voodoo Banshee) powered down.  However, it later woke up to finalize the install.  Problems were not over yet - we needed a BIOS update for the USB ports on the motherboard.  Since the motherboard is no longer in production and the motherboard manufacturer is not willing to fix this issue, we had to revert back to Windows Me due to the USB keyboard, USB mouse and USB camera.  Though this problem might not occur with the newer machines, we suggest you to ensure that you have the latest BIOS updates for your computer.  Surprisingly, most hardware such as the 3Com WinModem, and the networks worked perfectly after Windows was upgraded.  If you are wondering about the uninstall process of Windows XP, it actually is quite good - it did not damage any files or cause any problems.

On our second machine, we did clean install on another partition.  The install was perfect, without any issues.  Most of the hardware devices were detected and the proper drivers were installed however only one device, the USB video camera did not work.  This is not because of Microsoft but the manufacturer of the video camera and the non compliant drivers.

The install process in most computer will probably go fine without any issues, however the hardware may need some new drivers.  Software such as earlier versions of Norton Anti-Virus will not work on XP.