Any reinstall advice?

[jducoeur]

Hmm. Okay, I think the laptop is getting well and truly hosed. It hasn't been as stable as I'd like for some time now, and installing the WiFi card seems to have pushed it over the edge -- it's bluescreening frequently. I could probably back out the drivers, but I'm seriously thinking of just wiping it and starting again from scratch. It's currently Windows ME (a dreadful operating system), and I'm inclined to upgrade it to XP (which, unusually for Windows, doesn't suck). I'm half-thinking of just buying a new laptop anyway, but msmemory would like to keep this one alive and active, so that we have two available in the long run.

However, I've actually never done a Windows upgrade -- I've tended to just get a new OS every time I buy a new machine, and leave the old machines with the old OS. Anyone have opinions to share on the process? I'm not too concerned about damage here: it's an old laptop, and we've intentionally kept it free of mission-critical data. Still, I'd rather have some idea of what I'm getting into before I start. One way or another, I have to resolve this in the next day or so, since I need a machine up and stable before Accademia on Tuesday.

Comments

Re: What are the specs on the laptop?

[jtdiii.livejournal.com]

First and foremost take a look at your system specs. If you do not have at least a 1Ghz processor, and 128Mb memory (preferably 256M), I would recommend against the upgrade. Microsoft says it will run on less, but then they also say that their web browser cannot be extracted from the OS.

The upgrade itself is fairly painless, just long. You will want to download the security patches asap once you have done the upgrade as well.

Back up any critical file or data before you start. Paranoia can be your friend, and lost data is hard to replace.

Re: What are the specs on the laptop?

[goldsquare.livejournal.com]

May I suggest that you download the security patches onto a
CD before you do the upgrade - keep the sucker off the net
until they are on there.... as you probably know.

Re: What are the specs on the laptop?

[laurion]

There's a great tool I use in my job for this. It's called AutoPatcher (www.autopatcher.com). Download this, and SP1s for XP. Burn onto a single CD, and it'll do all the patching for you silently.

Re: What are the specs on the laptop?

[metageek.livejournal.com]

Back up any critical file or data before you start.

You could buy a new hard drive and a USB adapter for your current drive. Swap in the new drive, get XP working, then use the USB adapter to plug in the current drive and copy everything over. That way, you don't waste time burning N+1 backup CDs, but your data isn't available to be trashed until the install is done; and, if the install fails, your restore process is just swapping the old drive back in.

(The USB adapater is because I'm assuming your laptop doesn't have room to just install a second drive. That's what I've typically done for big-bang upgrades on my desktop machines.)

Re: What are the specs on the laptop?

[jducoeur]

I think everyone's kind of missing the point: there's *nothing* critical on this machine. We put all the important stuff on the desktop, and have always treated the laptop as expendable. So I went and got a keychain USB drive, and msmemory and I dug through the hard drive, picking out the few minor data files that lived on it.

As it happens, I'm going to try the simplest big-bang for now. I found the reinstall disk for the laptop, and I'm going to try simply wiping the hard drive and starting again from scratch. Still Windows ME (I'm taking the warnings about XP being a bit too heavyweight for this machine seriously), but at least a clean copy of ME. We'll see if it works...

[johno.livejournal.com]

One of the major advantages of XP over ME is networking. ME only understands a limited subset of Windows Shares.

The main thing is to check the manufactures web site to see if they provide XP drivers for that particular laptop.

If they have XP drivers, it takes 2-5 hours for the install.

[cellio]

Dani has had to reinstall his OS a couple times and the process, while long, was not complicated.

I had to reinstall an OS once, and I decided to just go ahead and upgrade it. (This was 95 -> 98, and a while ago.) That turned out to be a mistake; I kept running into errors during the installation process, and I couldn't say with certainty that they were the OS. I mean, maybe I had a hardware fault and nothing would have worked. My inner QA person yelled at my inner optimist, and we agreed that in the future any recovery would start with a re-install and only then, if successful, proceed to an upgrade.

All that said, my upgrades, other than that one, have always come in the form of new hardware.

Re: Anything but ME!

[russkay.livejournal.com]

ME was probably the worst Windows iteration since 2.x; unstable to begin with and prone to crashing at the slightest problem. If your laptop has 256MB of RAM, by all means go for XP (and probably settle for the less-expensive Home Edition). If the laptop is 5 or 6 years old, however, you may not have hardware good enough to run XP, in which case I'd suggest going back to Win98 2nd Edition. I've run XP on all my laptops since it came out, and it has been largely troublefree and relatively stable.