Denys writes:
> In my opinion, it is better to
> reformat the disk and start fresh, in NTFS, on a clean disk than
> to upgrade.  This of course means that you must have good backups
> and the installation media for all your applications.

An interesting option for a PC OS upgrade for a machine that can handle an
additional disk drive would be something like this:

1) Remove the existing drive.

2) Install a new (probably much larger because you can and they're cheap)
drive.

3) Do a clean install of Win2K or WinXP on the new drive (could do Linux
instead if you really wanted to).

4) Install VMWare ($300, www.vmware.com, 30 day free demo).

5) Add the original system disk as a second disk drive.

6) Create a VMWare virtual machine that uses the second disk drive (in "raw
partition mode") as its C drive.

7) Now you can boot up this virtual machine and bingo, you've got your whole
old PC environment running in a window.

You retain access to the old os, applications, and data files without having
to deal with problems resulting from "upgrading" versus "installing", or
doing a full backup and restore, and you can bring over just the things you
need from the old environment to the new one as needed, so you don't have
any of the old junk cluttering up the "new" environment.

Plus you can now create other virtual machines to run multiple instances of
Linux and Windows OSes all at the same time.

I haven't tried this myself, but I'm pretty sure it should be practical
based on my reading of the VMWare doc.

G.

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