would you recomend upgrading from windows me or formating the hard drive and installing xp. would this improve the performence of windows xp?

A fresh install is always the way to go. Less chance of problems.

You also have the option of dual-boot - good during your evaluation and learning-curve phase. Also there are programs that will not run on XP. Try using Partition Magic or similar to create a partition onto which you can instal XP as as clean instal leaving ME intact on the other partition. Following installation you will get a boot option screen at bootup with XP as the default option and ME as the second choice. This is also a good benchmarking strategy as you can easily compare the two operating systems on like tasks. Good Luck WG

Here is what I would do (or did) 1. Use Partition Magic to make a new partition on your hard drive, (if you do not have one already) 2. Then again use partition magic to "copy partition" to copy your original OS, ME to your newly created partition. 3. Next pop in your xp pro disk and upgrade your orignal partition, from ME to XP pro 4. Now you will be able to boot to either partition. Then If you like xp pro and want to clean install you can, install it to your original, upgraded partition. 5. Then when you do that you will have a clean install of xp pro and your old winme still intact. (a clean istall is always better although you may not not notice much performance impovement, it is just alot easier to keep everything organized).

I have partitioned twice with XP pro now first at 3.5G & now at 6G, My advise is to give it loads of room because it eats up your HD like no tomorrow