XP x64 and XP pro differences??

Fuzz

Fuzz

Fuzz

Soldato
Joined
3 Aug 2003
Posts
15,921
Location
UK
I'm having a little hassle in "upgrading" to XP pro from XP Home ed.

The disc is an upgrade XP Pro disc (sp2) but somehow instead of formatting the HDD and installing Pro, it's installed a copy of Pro next to home, on the same Partition.
The setup sequence didn't seem to allow the option of removing partitions and "starting afresh".
I tried booting the disc from Power off and also loading the upgrade from previous windows install, both of which gave me similar options.

How do I get this XP pro upgrade disc to install properly and wipe the HDD clean. :confused: odd!

Or the other alternative is to use another disc I have (standalone, i.e not an upgrade disc) which is XP Pro 64 edition, however I don't know how that's going to fair with the software I need to run!
Does an x64 O/S not contain whatever is needed for normal 32 bit programs to work, or is it additional software ontop of a normal 32 bit type disc..

Confused as to what I road to head down..

Andy
 
If you can get the 64bit drivers for all your hardware, then the only real 'drawback' of 64bit XP, is incompatibility with older 16bit applications. With normal XP you can normally get virtually any program to work, but with 64bit the old memory extenders simply dont work.

For most people this isnt an issue, how many people these days want to load say... Warcraft 'Orcs and Humans'. Most software designed for windows 95 or later will work.

There are a few exceptions, most Anti Virus software wont work, you need a special 64bit version (many are available now), also CD writing software, some works, but some will only work if you buy/upgrade to a 64 bit version.

However, if you can find the drivers, and dont run antique software than XP Pro 64bit edition is a very stable OS, based on Windows 2003 Server instead of XP.

Anyway to clarify, 'Most' 32bit software will run on XP64 without issues, but the oldest 16bit software is afaik unfixably incompatible.
 
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