"Upgrading" to XP Pro

[unfaithfulsfan]

This may sound like a really wierd question but is it possible to "upgrade" from XP Home to XP Pro without losing any data?

The reason I ask is we have a customer that uses an extremely expensive graphics program. For reasons unbeknownst to me, he does not have and can not get an installation disk for the program. XP Home will not support dual processors so we're kind of up the creek here for the OS since we built the machine before this was brought to our attention. Suffice it to say, my boss does not want to eat a $3500 machine.

At the very least, does anyone know of any kind of "migration" app to move a program? I remember back around Win 95 Norton had a utility that would allow you to migrate applications from one PC to another but that was before Windows was so bloated.

Thanks,
Jack

[DMB2000uk]

XP Home does actually support dual core CPUs (probably quad for that matter), what it is that XP home doesn't support is more than one physical processor (so if you have two processor sockets on your board, XP home will only work with one of them). It's easy to think that dual core CPUs count as 2 CPUs but they don't actually in this case.

But if you still want to go from home to pro, here are some suggestions that you can try:

You should test this theory on another machine before you try it for real, but have you tried putting the Pro disk in the Home PC and seeing if it will let you do an upgrade install? If it says that the pro version is older than the home currently installed, check that the SP on the disk is later than the SP on the machine (uninstall a SP from the machine if you can).2

At the very worst you can do a repair install of windows pro over the home installation. It should keep everything else ok, but the install might be a bit bloated.

If you are at a complete loss as to what to do, check around the net , for ISO's/installers for this graphics program and use their current serial key (usually in the 'help -> about' section) with the new version. Double check that the key will work if you do this (probably on another machine again).

Dan

[unfaithfulsfan]

Thanks once again, Dan. That's exactly the problem, there are two physical processors on this one.

I also found this software last night : http://www.laplink.com/pcmover

After some research, there are mixed reviews on it (they either loved it or hated it, no middle ground) but as a last resort, it may be worth a shot if all else fails.

I'll piece together a machine and try the upgrade. Thanks again

Jack

[unfaithfulsfan]

Just to let you know the upgrade path worked so I'm able to just image the drive to the new machine and reactivate Windows

[DMB2000uk]

That's good news ^_^

Dan