I upgraded from ME to XP home edition but not a clean install. My system has some problems, modem, a bit sticky and won't shutdown without plugging out the power. Should I reformat and do a clean intall? Would it make any difference to performance, reliability, etc?

When I installed XP on my machine, I did an Fdisk and completely reformatted the harddrive. (not exactly by choice, I had a virus on my machine). but, the only problem I had so far, is that XP thinks that my modem is a T1 connection, but it is only a 56k US robotics. it works though. The best part about XP clean installation, is you han format the hard drive to NTFS. it is more stable than FAT32. I have not had 1 program crash on me yet. As to when I had ME, I had a program crash at least once every 4 hours. I reccomend a clean install, it is alot more stable than upgrading from previous versions of windows.

A clean install is recommened for XP rather than an upgrade...In microsoft's words..

Here's my 2 cents... Microsoft has never been able to provide the public with an OS that will upgrade a previous OS without a glitch. When I did some research, at Microsoft's website, most software I have will work in XP but must be re-installed. Now, why would you perform an upgrade, just to have to re-install the software? A clean install is recommended as stated above. By the way, if, and I mean if, you're wondering why XP does not crash, I'll tell you. Someone was able to hack into Microsoft, it was on the news, and got the source code for Windows... this means that if Microsoft did not release a stable OS, someone else could and would have.

Actually, code written by MS would need to be fully documented in order for any part of it to be used in the formation of a new OS. And as any programmer knows, full documentation is the least of your worries, especially when you are working on something as large as an operating system. With millions of lines of code, most likely 1/3 of them are undocumented. And I'd be surprised if the programmers could figure out what the undocumented code was, much less someone who hacked them and downloaded it. My 2 cents