upgrading to win xp pro?

[dragon]

Hello I currently have a older Dell xps-r350, upgraded to 750 pent III, with 384 ram. I got a p4p800asus board and plan on putting a p4 2.4 800mhz cpu in it with 512 ram ddr to start. Windows 98 OS

Now What can I do with my old hard drive? How do I handle converting my drive to XP, does it just install over the Win 98? Can I just use the same drive? Ive never really dealt with changing OS so I just want to know the best way to do it?

Also can i just run windows 98 initially if I wanted to do upgrade a bit later? Can i just hook up the old drive and boot it up? Sorry if Im a bit naive about this, trying to rebuild my older computer...
thanks

 

[4Ryan6]

Hello I currently have a older Dell xps-r350, upgraded to 750 pent III, with 384 ram. I got a p4p800asus board and plan on putting a p4 2.4 800mhz cpu in it with 512 ram ddr to start. Windows 98 OS

The first problem I see is you'll need a Power Supply thats P4 approved, probably 300W, your old P/S will not work.

Now What can I do with my old hard drive? How do I handle converting my drive to XP, does it just install over the Win 98? Can I just use the same drive? Ive never really dealt with changing OS so I just want to know the best way to do it?

You can use your old hardrive, It'll probably be an ATA66, and you set the CMOS setup to boot from CDROM drive and XP can be loaded and wipe out 98 for you if thats what you want.

Also can i just run windows 98 initially if I wanted to do upgrade a bit later? Can i just hook up the old drive and boot it up? Sorry if Im a bit naive about this, trying to rebuild my older computer...
thanks

You can run Win 98 if you have an installation disk, but if you change out the Motherboard you'll have to reinstall the operating system from scratch, so backup your critical data first to disk. You'll have to format the hardrive and all the data on the hardrive will be wiped out, thats the reason for backing up the files.


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