Windows XP: Clean Install or Upgrade?

Introduction

At this writing, Microsoft is selling the retail versions of Windows XP build 2600 as retail products, as disks for distribution with OEM (original equipment manufacturer) packages, and as corporate installations suitable for mass deployment by corporations. When you buy a PC with Windows XP pre-installed, you will typically look to that PC maker for Windows XP support, whereas when you buy Windows XP in a retail box, you may contact Microsoft for support directly. There are a few other differences in the versions, too. Corporate versions of Windows XP Professional do not require the "Windows Product Activation" procedure that essentially locks retail and OEM (original equipment manufacturer) versions of the product to a single PC, eliminating the possibility of installing a retail or OEM release on two or more computers. OEM versions do not provide the upgrade and uninstall options provided by retail versions. "Full" retail versions do not require the presence of a previous Windows (98 or newer) CD, as do the retail upgrade editions. As well, there are different versions of Windows XP aimed at home users and office users. The product on retail shelves as of Oct. 25 is priced as follows:

Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition - Full US$199 / C$299
Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition - Upgrade US$99 / C$159 (requires Win98/NT/2000/Me)
Microsoft Windows XP Professional - Full US$299 / C$449
Microsoft Windows XP Professional - Upgrade US$199 / C$299 (requires Win98/NT/2000/Me)
Home Edition OEM (typically, sold with a new computer) - C$145
Professional OEM (typically, sold with a new computer) - C$249

The Professional version includes everything found in the Home edition, plus several features some users will want: the ability to connect to a server domain, the option to take advantage of two processors, additional security and encryption options and access to a Remote Desktop feature that allows a Windows XP system to act as a terminal server for another computer.

We've been busy testing Windows XP against a wide variety of hardware and software, to help you sidestep problems, should you decide to upgrade. And that's our first topic: should you upgrade?

Should You Upgrade?

"Upgrade&quoe ever -- for home users of Windows PCs. As we've noted in previous reports, for the first time, it brings the crash-resistant kernel of Windows 2000 to a home user-oriented operating system and makes many tasks easier than ever to accomplish. After more than six months of testing XP, we still think it's a a great step forward. On our test systems (t; is the operative word here. Windows XP is a significant upgrade -- perhaps the most significant upgradand even a couple of production systems running the most recent releases), it virtually eliminates crashes and out-of-memory misbehaviors that had seemingly become the norm in our day-to-day experiences with Windows Me.

However, we do have some complaints, which we'll note later in this article. First, let's look at the pros and cons of performing a "clean installation" versus and upgrade of an existing Windows system.

Clean Install
This option requires you to reinstall all your applications, device drivers and may cause data loss of email addresses, documents and/or other personal data, depending on how you elect to perform the installation. When you boot Windows XP from the CD and attempt to install the system onto a hard drive or partition with an existing version of Windows (say, Windows 98 or Windows Me), the system warns you that you cannot have two operating systems on the same drive and cautions that, if the installer proceeds, the files in the "My Documents" folder may be lost, all programs and personal settings will be deleted and so on. Unless you have a computer with two hard drives -- or a hard drive partitioned to show two or more "drive letters," replacing your existing version of Windows is your only option, at least without third-party "multi-boot" trickery.

Thus, the clean install questions come down to:

Do you want to reformat the drive?
If so, do you want to format the hard disk as FAT32 or NTFS?
In any event, are you willing to reinstall everything?

With few exceptions, our upgrade experiences with Windows XP have been positive. Problems with older device drivers or misbehaving applications have usually been easy to resolve, and we haven't noticed a significant difference in reliability between upgraded systems and "clean" installations. If you want to start with a clean slate and the most reliable possible Windows XP installation, we advise going with a clean installation. As noted above, if you have an OEM version of Windows XP, a clean installation is your only option.

Upgrade
We have upgraded successfully from Windows 98, Windows Me and Windows 2000. In all cases, Windows XP flagged potentially troublesome applications and device drivers prior to the upgrade, in an effort to eliminate problems. (Try the test at www.pcpitstop.com/xpready/ or, if you don't mind downloading a 32MB file, there's Microsoft's own Upgrade Advisor, which is essentially the same as that invoked during the XP upgrade.) When attempting to upgrade from Windows Me, for example, it warned us that our version of Norton AntiVirus must be disabled or uninstalled before proceeding. (A quick trip to the Add/Remove Programs control panel to remove the Norton files fixed that problem.) You may also find a few programs (usually of the "fix-it" variety of utility -- Roxio's "GoBack" is one example) that won't work after the upgrade. These files may in some cases block an upgrade attempt, causing the XP installer to stop with a report advising you on how to proceed. The offending applications or drivers can usually be uninstalled by the Windows XP Add/Remove Control Panel, much as they would be under Windows 9x or 2000.

It's prudent, before undertaking a Windows XP upgrade, to check that the devices in your system are supported under Windows 2000. If they are, there is an excellent chance they will work under Windows XP. If not, and the device does not appear in the Windows XP HCL Hardware Compatibility List, you may not be able to use the device under XP. Fortunately, almost everything on the market has a Windows 2000 driver at this point, and it's only the very old or the very odd that will cause problems. In some cases, you can install troublesome devices with Windows 98 WDM (Windows Driver Model) drivers, but we've had much better success with Windows 2000 drivers, or, of course, built-in Windows XP drivers if they are provided.

Indeed, given a choice between Windows XP drivers and third-party Windows 2000 drivers, you should choose the XP drivers if you are striving for maximum stability. Microsoft has digitally "signed" all the drivers that have passed its quality assurance testing. The system warns you when you try to install an unsigned driver that doing so may compromise system integrity. They aren't kidding. We encountered some weird problems when using Windows 2000 drivers for a Sound Blaster Live card and an ATI Radeon. Using the native XP drivers, these devices caused no further trouble. You may lament the loss of a few gadgety features in an OEM's drivers for these devices. If so, by all means install the OEM driver and see how it fares under XP. If you encounter trouble, there's always the System Restore feature in Windows XP (similar to that found in Windows Me, but without the "ALL CAPS" bug that makes restored filenames look terrible after a WinMe system restoration) to help you back out of a troublesome spot. This is, hands down, our favorite feature in Windows XP (and Windows Me). Maybe you're lucky and haven't ever installed a driver or program that made your computer go wonky, but if you have, you'll appreciate the ability to turn back the clock to the moment before the error appeared.

If the upgrade goes for you the way it did in our tests, Windows XP will offer to save your old Windows system files, allowing you to uninstall Windows XP later if you wish. This takes a few hundred megabytes of disk space, but can provide added peace of mind for nervous upgraders. These files can be deleted later if you decide Windows XP is a keeper.

To test this feature, we successfully uninstalled Windows XP, restoring a previous Windows Me installation. It worked without incident, warning us during the process that a few of the applications we had installed (WinDVD 3.0 and Norton AntiVirus 2002) would need to be reinstalled after the "downgrade" was complete. They did.

We also successfully installed Windows Me on a system that already had Windows XP installed. To really test a "worst-case" scenario, we formatted our hard disk with a single NTFS disk partition. NTFS, as you may know, is not readable while running Windows Me or previous 9x releases. We installed Windows XP onto this drive. Then, we installed PowerQuest's PartitionMagic 7.0 and added a second partition to the drive, effectively dividing the available disk space into "C" and "D" drives. We formatted the C drive as FAT32. Then, we rebooted with a Windows Me CD (you could also use the Windows Me or 98 startup floppy) and installed Windows Me onto drive C. When the installation was complete, the system booted directly to Windows Me. We then rebooted with the Windows XP CD and selected the "install" option, choosing the "Repair" option when prompted. After the installation was complete, both Windows XP and Windows Me appeared on a boot menu at startup time -- and all of our original documents and data installed under Windows XP were still intact, thanks to PartitionMagic's non-destructive re-partitioning abilities! Of course, the NTFS partition is still not accessible to Windows Me; if this is important, you would need to either set up XP on a FAT32 partition or install a third-party NTFS driver for Windows 9x. Unfortunately, we were unable to use PartitionMagic to non-destructively convert the NTFS partition to FAT or FAT32; the program complained that "Data is compressed or Sparse" and aborted our attempt at NTFS-to-FAT32 conversion. For dual-boot compatibility (and slightly better disk performance), we recommend formatting XP partitions with FAT32 and installing XP initially onto a drive other than C: to minimize problems.

Test Hardware

We've been testing Windows XP since the Spring of 2001 and have installed literally dozens of different builds on a wide variety of hardware. Most recently, we've been testing the final retail and OEM builds on several widely differing PC models, with many different hardware and software components. The following list is by no means comprehensive, but details some of the notable successes and failures. As you'll see, the newer the hardware, the better XP seems to work.

High-end:
2 GHz Pentium 4, Intel D850MDAL mainboard, ATA100 (Maxtor) hard drive, 256MB RAM, Asus GeForce 3, Pioneer 16x DVD-ROM, SoundMAX audio - No obvious problems noted, although a benchmark test of the hard drive suggests that "DMA Mode 5" ATA100 drivers aren't being loaded by default.

1.2 GHz Athon, Asus A7A266 mainboard, 256MB (DDR PC2100) RAM, Asus Geforce 2, LG CD-writer, SB Live - No problems noted.

Mid-range
733 MHz Pentium 3, Abit BE6-II, 256MB RAM, ATI Radeon, Adaptec 2940UW SCSI card, HP 9600 CD writer, generic AC97 audio - Occasional (about 1 per week) blue-screen crashes noted after upgrading from Windows 2000. Using native Windows XP drivers for the Radeon seemed to improve reliability. Replacing the Radeon with a GeForce 3 eliminated the crashes entirely.

Dual Celeron 450, Asus P2B-D mainboard, 56K modem, AC97 audio, Adaptec ISA SCSI card - Occasional spontaneous restarts (about 1 per week) on a system that had previously been stable (but taking advantage of only one processor) under Windows 98. If a PS/2 mouse plugged in, the SCSI card stopped working due to IRQ conflict. IRQ contention also seemed to be the cause behind occasional blue screen of death ("BSOD") system halts, with a crash screen complaining of an IRQ_LESS... error. These fatal BSOD barf-outs are nothing new - we've seen NTOSKRNL kernel errors producing similar results since about 1995. We're willing to bet this will become the #1 complaint (well, after Windows Product Activation) with Windows XP.

600 MHz Celeron, ECS mainboard, 128MB RAM, on-board i810 graphics, onboard sound, external Shark Multimedia modem - Needed an unsigned Win2K driver for the audio and external USB modem. No issues were noted at first and the modem seemed to work, but we later discovered that the modem driver was causing the system to lock up at random. Removing the modem and driver and installing a supported AOpen 56K internal modem solved the problem. The pre-2000 BIOS on this computer didn't allow XP to automatically shut itself off, despite the fact that the shut-off feature had previously worked under Windows 98. XP halted at the "It is now safe to turn off your computer" screen, requiring a press of the power button. No big whoop.

Dual Pentium II/233, SuperMicro P6DLE mainboard, Asus 3800U (NVIDIA TNT2 Ultra) graphics card, 224MB PC66 SDRAM, SoundBlaster AWE32 audio, VIA PCMCIA host adapter, NatSemi InfoMover 4100 network card. No problems noted. This system ran very nicely under XP, incidentally.

We tested a few other PCMCIA cards under XP, with varying degrees of success. A FutureDomain SCSI2GO card didn't work at all, and the KME SCSI card supplied with the HP m8230e external CD writer sort of worked, but significantly reduced system stability. Orinoco Gold 802.11b wireless LAN cards (for which XP provides full support) worked like a dream. There's a lesson here. Don't use unsigned drivers.

Low End
500 MHz Celeron, Abit ZM6 mainboard, 128 MB RAM, ATI All-in-Wonder 128, SB 16 sound - Needed to manually set IRQ for ISA sound card. No other problems noted.

233 MHz Pentium 1, Iwill Socket 7 mainboard, 160 MB RAM, Elsa Erazor II (NVIDIA TNT), internal Rockwell 28.8 modem, AT power, no sound. No "suspend" option, due to AT power supply limitations. Adaptec ISA SCSI card - Needed to manually set IRQ and memory allocation for SCSI card. Misbehaved in a variety of ways when APM advanced power management was set to "on." Windows XP runs fairly sluggishly on this system. It automatically recognized and configured the ISA modem, though - we were fairly impressed.

Unsupported Hardware and Software
Although, as noted above, the vast majority of Windows 2000-compatible devices and application work fine on Windows XP, we tested a number of hardware devices (and more than a few games) that had previously worked under Windows 9x and Windows Me that weren't supported under XP. A few of these include: the Sony CD-ROM controller on a SoundBlaster 16 card, a JVC 2010 CD-R and the above-mentioned PCMCIA cards. There are, of course, many, many other application and hardware compatibility issues. Overall, though, compatibility is amazingly good. Microsoft says there are drivers for over 15,000 supported devices. Search the list at www.microsoft.com/hcl to find out if your hardware is supported.

Although Windows XP provides a "Compatibility Mode" that can fool many programs into running, it didn't work on a few games we tried. Take a look at the list at DevX - Windows XP Developer Center at http://windowsxp.devx.com/appcompat/view_issues.asp. It lists known compatibility issues regarding software and Windows XP. But take the reports with a grain of salt. We noticed a few "problems" listed there that seemed to work fine on our test systems.

Annoyances

The most interesting -- and frustrating -- experience we had during our tests was not related to hardware or third-party software at all. On one of our machines, we installed Windows XP, entered in our (legal) serial number, installed all the necessary device drivers and installed a number of programs we had intended to test. We rebooted a few times, as driver and application installations sometimes require. When we'd restart, XP would ask us if we'd like to activate this copy of Windows XP. We said no, as we hadn't yet configured the machine for Internet access. We then installed anti-virus software, configured the machine for Internet access, downloaded some email, created some documents, bla bla bla. We then shut the machine down and set it aside... and essentially got distracted doing other things for 30 days. By the time we booted up the system again, the Windows XP grace period had ended and -- surprise! -- we were royally screwed. XP halted at the logon page, telling us that the system must be activated before we would be able to log on. It asked: "would you like to activate Windows now?" We said yes... and nothing happened. The same dialog box popped up again and again. Thinking, surely, this must be a glitch caused by not being connected to the Internet (although how you'd connect to the Internet when you can't log in is not at all clear to us), we took the machine to a location with "always on" Internet Access and connected it to the Ethernet wire. Same problem.

We were starting to get a bit worried. Ok, let's reboot in Guest mode. Same problem. Safe mode? Same problem. Rebooting with the Windows XP CD and choosing "repair" almost worked, but Windows XP crashed halfway through whatever repairs it was trying to make to save our precious data.

Believe it or not, there was nothing we could find to solve this problem, short of reinstalling Windows from scratch -- and operation, we were horrified to discover, that deletes all your applications, all your user preferences and settings and may erase your documents, too. We found this mega-annoying. It just seems wrong. Now the computer (or Microsoft, as the case may be) is completely in charge of the user and if you don't jump up to do its bidding when it says "jump," you're screwed. WPA is quickly turning into our least favorite Windows XP feature -- and, remember, we were using a legal, non-cracked version when this happened. So I don't buy that whole argument that WPA won't inconvenience honest users. Anyway, it certainly inconveniences procrastinators.

(Update: in a subsequent test, we tried this on a machine with a built-in modem and found that Windows XP was able to successfully dial the modem and connect to a Microsoft 1-800 number to successfully complete the activation step. So, the problem noted above appears to be limited to certain hardware configurations only.

For Further Reading:

Whistler - Part 1 - an overview of Windows XP
Whistler - part 2 - IE6, Media Player 8 and....copy protection?
Windows XP - a closer look at the "Luna" GUI and other new features.
Windows XP: The Upgrade that Wasn't - Not a good day.
Windows XP RC1 - a test of Release Candidate 1.
Windows XP RC2 - a test of Release Candidate 2.
Windows XP Benchmarks - Microsoft says it's faster. Is it?
Improving Hard Drive Performance in Windows XP
Windows XP Tips - Registry hacks and other performance tips.
emulators.com: A 60-minute tutorial on Windows XP

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Windows XP: Clean Install or Upgrade?

Should You Upgrade?

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