Dear Sirs:

My laptop uses Windows ME software and due to its upcoming support ending, I wonder if I should upgrade to XP. My strongest concern is how the OS upgrade will affect the notebook performance velocity and if I would end with a very slow machine.

My current notebook configuration is as follows: Compaq Presario 12XL400 (purchased in the year 2000), 13-inch HPA screen, Intel Celeron 700 MHz processor,312 MB RAM, a 10 GB hard drive, 24X CD-ROM,and 56K modem.

Appearantly this configuration complies with XP minimum requirements, except maybe the 1.5 to 5 GB of available hard disk space (I only have a free availability of around 3GB).

Your response will be higly appreciated.

Thanks and regards

This would seem only glancingly related to WinME

XP's requirements are greater than ME's, but it's also based on NT instead of DOS, so it has none of those limitations - it's difficult to foresee just how your machine would compare once upgraded - you'd likely have to make that determination yourself

Depending on what you intend to use this machine for, more RAM and a larger hard drive might be advisable - I'm running XP Pro on a lesser system with no complaints, but every board is different, and what satisfies my purposes might not satisfy yours

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Also, when you say upgrade, I hope you don't mean actually leaving WinME installed & then upgrading it "in place". The best way to do it would be to backup any important data, then format the HDD & install WinXP from scratch.

XP with all the updates would require 3GB hard drive space, add basic software we all use AV, Firewall, Acrobat, Office and 5GB is soon reached.

ME support is not an issue, also XP will cost $100 so not really worth the trouble cost wise..........

Depends - I've got SP2 on a 4Gb drive (with just under 2Gb free) - never been keen on updates, if I ever actually need one, I'll install it.

For most folks though, that'd be pretty constrictive - for sure, I don't intend to install many more apps on this one, and most of the ones I have chosen (except WMP10) are 'slimware'

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Just because support ends does not mean the OS is suddenly unusable.

Couldnt agree more with the above post about the upgrade. Do yourself a HUGE favor and format it and do a clean install or you will be disappointed.

understand that when the techs find other ways into ME through your network you will not be able to get patches to plug the upcoming holes and if you're online with a venerable firewall and OS you will prob get pinched at some point :) so go ahead and get your updates from some geek in Hawaii who claims that he has updates for ME and sit back and see how long it takes before you regret staying with it... sure you can run win3.1 or dos if you want - but you better not be active online :)

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