Help: Windows 98 To Windowsxp

Hey, My mum has a PC that is very slow and extremley frustrating to use. She's still running Win98 and I want to upgrade her machine to WinXP to see if that improves performance at all…not to mention its just better (in my opinion anyway…). What Im wondering is if I can just install Xp over the top or whether I need to backup all her data onto another hard drive, format the original drive, install XP and then copy all her data back again… The backup procedure sure sounds like the best thing to do but if anyone knows about over the top OS upgrades I'd be glad to hear about it!! Generally, what would people recommend??? Cheers, J-Ral

hello J-Ral,

A machine that is slow and frustrating, will most likely be the same with a newer OS.
xp may be more "stable" than w98, but probably wont improve performance. i would fill up all the SDRAM slots if any are available. "speed" is very dependent on CPU/memory/HD,adding memory would be inexpensive and most likley improve performance.


http://www.pcworld.com/howto/article/0,aid,112922,00.asp

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1759,1202585,00.asp