Win 98 to Win 2K Pro

  • Thread starter Thread starter juzme
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J

juzme

My wife has a Dell Inspiron 4000 Laptop I want to upgrade to Win 2K Pro.
There is a vertical line from the top to the bottom of the screen that
happened when she accidently clicked her mouse and dragged it down. Does
anyone know how I can get rid of this before I try upgrading? There was a
second line but it went away without us doing anything.

Dave
 
juzme said:
My wife has a Dell Inspiron 4000 Laptop I want to upgrade to Win 2K Pro.
There is a vertical line from the top to the bottom of the screen that
happened when she accidently clicked her mouse and dragged it down. Does
anyone know how I can get rid of this before I try upgrading? There was a
second line but it went away without us doing anything.

Dave
Click to expand...

Don't upgrade - do a clean installation of Win2000. You will
end up with a rock-solid operating system, not with something
that is the result of countless compromises, adjustments and
flaws that have accumulated in your Win98 installation over
time.
 
Pegasus,

I'd do a clean install of Win 2K if it was possible but wife has lots of
work files on the drive that I can't compromise losing.

Dave
 
There are two groups of people: Those who back up
their important files every week, and those who do
not do it just yet, relying instead on the ongoing
integrity of their hard disk, applications & operating
system.

Eventually, everyone ends up in the first group. The
transition can be very painful. Regular contributors
to this newsgroup know the familiar sound of gnashing
teeth.

What I am saying is this: Your reason for upgrading
rather than starting with a clean system is a very poor
one. Sooner or later your wife will be caught out badly.
I am professionally into PC support, and I deal with
failed hard disks, corrupted file systems, lost files etc.
all the time. It is the most unpleasant part of my job:
Having to tell a customer "Sorry, your files are
irretrievably lost". Implementing a proper backup
process AFTER the event invariably leaves a sour
taste in everybody's mouth.

You said: "lots of work files that I can't compromise losing".
You should now ask yourself: Can you afford not to back
them up?
 
I have done quite a few Win 98 to Win 2000 upgrades ... mostly on the same
machine!!! Reason being that I bought a PC pre-configured with Win98 and
lots of OEM software, but was very unhappy with the reliability of Win98
beyond basic home applications (e.g. when running Photoshop or anything else
intensive, or multitasking serious applications). So I upgraded to Win2000,
was very happy with the performance and the smoothness of the upgrade,
except that my sound card was not supported by Win2000, which has caused
some problems. I upgraded so I could continue to use the OEM software (which
is on security CDs and can't be installed without the OS).

My experience is that a "home user" should not experience too many problems
upgrading to W2K (my notebook has been happily upgraded for three years
without a drama). You should, of course, check that all your hardware is
compatible with W2K before starting the upgrade.

But if you are any kind of a power user, degredations over time (which I
assume are leftovers from installing and removing various programs,
especially demos and trials) will cause your system to become less reliable.
Last week I finally got sick of reinstalling the W2K upgrade and service
packs to restore system performance, so I wiped the whole thing and
installed from scratch with NTFS filesystem and a backup partition.

Now the system has a core backup to a known stable system, plus incremental
backups every week, and a CD backup library which will allow me to roll back
(I hope) to any particular point in time. And yes, I learnt to backup the
hard way ... after losing all my files to an accidental reconfiguration of
disk partitions when I responded to an NAV "virus alert" without thinking
things through fully.

I am a home user, by the way, but I have run various businesses from my PC
over the last decade.

Tony
 
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