D'Artagnan1673
Baseband Member
- Messages
- 33
First off let me say that I have never been a fan of upgrading from one OS to another. This thread under the tips and tutorials from microsoftne echoes all of my concerns:
http://www.tech-heaven.com/forum/showthread.php?s=&threadid=3613
However, in spite of my better judgement I am considering this path for a specific scenario.
I maintain a paritcular lab of machines that are running Windows 98 with P III 866, 128 SD RAM, 20 Gig Hard Disks and NVidia 16 Meg Video cards. These units have always been very solid machines provided they were treated with respect. In the Fall of 2002 I purchased 1 full license of XP Pro and did a full install on one of these units after I first upgraded to 384 RAM. I found the machine to still be responsive and stable. All the hardware is compatible with XP; they were built in the summer of 2001.
The problem is this: The lab teacher is sick of the little heatens (6-8 grade) messing things up on the machines. She'd like to upgrade to Windows XP so that we, the manpower limited IT Deptartment, can lock down the machines with group policies. Yes, I am aware that there are tools to lock down Win 98 in a Win 2000 environment, however, our knowledge in this area is lacking. One of my techs has already done quite a bit of research in 2000/2003 group policies so this is probably a good route for us to go. Financially speaking it is less of a burded to purchase the software upgrade than the full version; we tend to like doing things the cheap way.
What do all of you gurus think of running the 98 to XP upgrae after first reformatting each unit to a clean version of Windows 98. Do you think we will avoid a lot of the disasters that would otherwise result?
Thanks!
http://www.tech-heaven.com/forum/showthread.php?s=&threadid=3613
However, in spite of my better judgement I am considering this path for a specific scenario.
I maintain a paritcular lab of machines that are running Windows 98 with P III 866, 128 SD RAM, 20 Gig Hard Disks and NVidia 16 Meg Video cards. These units have always been very solid machines provided they were treated with respect. In the Fall of 2002 I purchased 1 full license of XP Pro and did a full install on one of these units after I first upgraded to 384 RAM. I found the machine to still be responsive and stable. All the hardware is compatible with XP; they were built in the summer of 2001.
The problem is this: The lab teacher is sick of the little heatens (6-8 grade) messing things up on the machines. She'd like to upgrade to Windows XP so that we, the manpower limited IT Deptartment, can lock down the machines with group policies. Yes, I am aware that there are tools to lock down Win 98 in a Win 2000 environment, however, our knowledge in this area is lacking. One of my techs has already done quite a bit of research in 2000/2003 group policies so this is probably a good route for us to go. Financially speaking it is less of a burded to purchase the software upgrade than the full version; we tend to like doing things the cheap way.
What do all of you gurus think of running the 98 to XP upgrae after first reformatting each unit to a clean version of Windows 98. Do you think we will avoid a lot of the disasters that would otherwise result?
Thanks!