Originally Posted by Wheeler

I agree that the best option is a fresh installation on a clean HDD. It's a good opportunity to stick in a much bigger HDD, they're a great deal cheaper than they used to be and digital photography doesn't half eat up disc space.

My only real issues on moving to XP were that the drivers for my laser printer weren't verified (it still works although I get an annoying message every time I boot up) and my slide/negative scanner hasn't had XP drivers issued and won't work unless I use VueScan instead (I haven't used the scanner in a couple of years though).

If your PC was originally spec'd for Win98 you may find that it struggles with XP. This may be an opportunity to review your hardware as well.

Originally Posted by John

Thank you for the info. I do have two 200 Gb HDDs and 500 Mb ram. I don't think there is room for more ram on my MB. I have thought of a completely new computer but what with other things not sure I can afford it just yet.

Kind regards,
John

Originally Posted by John

I have run Crucial Span and it appears that I have room for a total of 2048 Mb of RAM. I Also have two 200 Gb hard drives installed and room for one more HDD. I will, therefore, install another HDD and put Windows XP together with Photoshop on that. This will save me upgrading many installed programs. Thank you.

John

Originally Posted by nirofo

Bear in mind that if you install WinXP on another drive your software will no longer be associated with Windows and you will still have to re-install it all again for it to be recognised by WinXP. You are still far better off doing a complete drive format and re-install, in any case WinXP needs to be installed as main operating system on drive 'C', if you try to install on any other drive letter you will run into difficulties later. Once you have installed WinXP on 'C' drive, you can install a second copy either in another partition or on a separate drive. When you boot up your computer you will be given the option to choose which operating system you wish to boot into, that is, if you have installed WinXP on 2 or more drives, (a partition is considered a drive), you are given the choice of which one to boot into. If you intend to put WinXP as the main operating system on your new 3rd drive, you will need to configure it to be the master disk 'C', this will entail you running FDisk or some proprietary software to install and format your drive/s. You will also need to make sure that the jumpers on the drives are configured correctly for the bios to recognise the order in which they boot. If they are set incorrectly the computer may fail to recognise them at all. I suggest that if you are unfamiliar with installing hard drives you download all the data specs and installation software for your particular drives from the manufacturers website before you even attempt it. Look on Google for info on installing hard drives and operating systems, there's plenty available! Let me know what drives you are using and your motherboard name, model number and spec and I will try to give you more info.

nirofo.