DHA Posted February 12, 2003 Report Share Posted February 12, 2003 A combination of AOL and Norton Anti Virus has knackered my PC. I am considering upgrading to XP or would it be more hassle than its worth? I run a P3 450 with 128mb of ram (but likely to buy some from crucial soon) I like Win98 for home use but i am looking at a clean boot and it will take a lot of work. Should i go the XP route or not? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
fatcat Posted February 12, 2003 Report Share Posted February 12, 2003 Interesting one......... last year we upgraded to home XP and the Norton anti virus caused XP to freeze all the time. The advice we received was to disable N AV. We did this and all was fine. I have since bought N AV 2003 and it all works fine. I think there was a known bug that made the 2 disagree. Go for XP, is there any other !! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
snez22 Posted February 12, 2003 Report Share Posted February 12, 2003 windows2000 is good also. i use that at home and its fine. i upgraded from win98SE. Couldn't upgrade though, had to format my hard drive and install from scratch. best way. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ChrisT Posted February 12, 2003 Report Share Posted February 12, 2003 If you are going to use XP at home you will need more than 128 MB of RAM. My machine has 256, and my old work machine was a lower spec but with 512 and I can tell you which one was faster to use day to day, so I'd stick at least a 256MB DIMM in your machine, shouldn't cost you very much because its plain old SDRAM. XP also munches disk space for breakfast so you might want to consider a new hard disk too. I use XP myself, it has lots of nice little features which I love. Things like it changes the folder view settings depending on what sort of files are in the directory. e.g. if you have a dir which has a few pics in it, it will change all the icons for the files into thumbnails, plus it gives a load of other options which are picture related. Another thing which is really good about XP is the default driver support. I've bought a new camera and printer recently, just plugged them in and XP loaded the drivers, no reading off the CD or rebooting they just worked. XP also has a feature called system restore points, which if you do install a dodgy piece of software or driver it allows you to switch back to an exact copy of an earlier setup. You should also be able to upgrade your current win98 setup, I've done this on a flakey win98 laptop and it sorted everything out and its now as stable as you like. All you have to do is stick the XP CD in and it does the rest. Have I convinced you ?? Chris. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DHA Posted February 13, 2003 Author Report Share Posted February 13, 2003 Pretty much. Hard disk has 6 gig free at the moment, new PC probably late this year/early next but at the moment this one is pissing me off. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
A3Floyd Posted February 13, 2003 Report Share Posted February 13, 2003 i tried the XP route on my P3 500 and reinstalled win98 a few days later. I'm running 256mb ram and i found that it was too heavy on my resources. Personally, for my home PC i choose 98 all the time. It's not very resource hungry, i've never had a problem with compatibility (gfx cards etc) and at the end of the day, it does the job very well. XP's got a very nice whizz-bang GUI but it all comes at a cost to your system resources Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DHA Posted February 14, 2003 Author Report Share Posted February 14, 2003 If i upgrade to XP will it create a new registry? I think this is the source of one of my problems Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ChrisT Posted February 14, 2003 Report Share Posted February 14, 2003 XP will keep some bits and chuck the rest. My old laptop was really dodgy, usually took 2 reboots before you could use the system, it complained there was a registry error and needed to reboot, and did. Basically XP will keep the information about your applications and create a new bit for the system info drivers etc. Chris. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Hopsta Posted February 14, 2003 Report Share Posted February 14, 2003 Only problem with upgrading is that at a later date if you want to re-do your XP installation then you'll have to put on win9x/me/2000 first before it will let you install. Just a thought. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ChrisT Posted February 14, 2003 Report Share Posted February 14, 2003 Not true, the CD I have has installed bare machines and upgraded machines too. Chris. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Hopsta Posted February 14, 2003 Report Share Posted February 14, 2003 I stand corrected, my backup copy must have been duff then Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Johnny_TSport Posted February 15, 2003 Report Share Posted February 15, 2003 DHA I can sort you the memory and the copy of XP if you want. At "Trade" prices of course msn me or post on here. As the company is in Camberley you could pop down and pick both up if you like..... Dont forget that with XP if you load it on and then change the spec of your machine significantly you will end up on the phone to Microsoft as they will think your trying to load it on more than one machine! I have also had a customer who puchased XP for a laptop that was shite. So he sent it back and bought a diffrent model. Both had no operating system installed when he bought them as they were new. When he tried to activate windows the second time it would not let him. He called Microsoft and they told him as it had been activated on the other pc they would not activate it on this one. Even though he said he had all the documents coa etc.... He ended up having to buy another copy! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
danksy Posted February 16, 2003 Report Share Posted February 16, 2003 I can vouch for Johns prices, and service! Youch.. having to phone Microsoft if you u/grade your PC is a bit bloody harsh! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jape Posted February 16, 2003 Report Share Posted February 16, 2003 Same happened to me - bought XP when it first came out, installed it on my desktop. Then tried my laptop, and got the same response from Microsoft "you must buy another copy etc etc". Just hung up and phoned back 10 mins later and said I had changed the graphics card in my PC and windows was asking me for an activation code. They gave me one straight away Apparently, as long as you are not ringing up every week for a new activation code they are happy to give you 3 or 4 'chances'! Alternatively, check some of our more 'local' *ahem* ftp servers for a non activation copy Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Paul Posted February 16, 2003 Report Share Posted February 16, 2003 Yes. Devils own with key changer... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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