[benny9604]

xp home was loaded onto mini tower with a duron 900Mhz CPU, system has 256M RAM.
Previous operating system was Win 98!. To make things worse the system has an ADSL connetion to the net!
As far as I know if xp was an upgrade from 98 there will be problems, what's the best approach?

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Not sure why you say "to make things worse this system has ADSL connection.......". So what's wrong with that? --- I have ADSL and it's fine, so do thousands of others who don't live in a cable area.

Anyways. As far as XP upgrades are concerned, the golden rule is to do a 'clean install' (actually that applies to all Windows installs, not just XP). Format the drive to clean everything off it, then install XP. You will then have a much cleaner system and no leftover 98 files which may be causing trouble. As for it being slow, your pushing it to expect any sort of decent performance from XP with only a 900Mhz Duron and 256MB RAM. Both should be at least double what they are now. The RAM increase is the easier of the two and that alone will make a big difference. But the CPU upgrade depends on what mobo you have.

[pip22]

Not sure why you say "to make things worse this system has ADSL connection.......". So what's wrong with that? --- I have ADSL and it's fine, so do thousands of others who don't live in a cable area.

Anyways. As far as XP upgrades are concerned, the golden rule is to do a 'clean install' (actually that applies to all Windows installs, not just XP). Format the drive to clean everything off it, then install XP. You will then have a much cleaner system and no leftover 98 files which may be causing trouble. As for it being slow, your pushing it to expect any sort of decent performance from XP with only a 900Mhz Duron and 256MB RAM. Both should be at least double what they are now. The RAM increase is the easier of the two and that alone will make a big difference. But the CPU upgrade depends on what mobo you have.

[samiko]

sometimes if there is a conflict or a corrupt driver, it would be recorded in the eventveiwer as a warning or an error so check your eventlog and device manager.

[1nfection]

A clean install is the way to go. I used to refurbish systems locally, and I ran into that when I would do an upgrade, but a fresh install never has those types of problems. A fresh install is always the best way to go. Back-up what you want to keep, and then go from there. The install process for XP is very self-explanatory.

[samiko]

I agree with 1nfection

I don't recommend an upgrade! because whatever was wrong with your previous OS can cause even more problems post-upgrade.

But if you don't have a backup and you want to keep what you have then you better have the pace into finding the resolution as it could be long and complicated.

[benny9604]

thanks folks, I'll backup and reinstall from scratch

[1nfection]

Sounds good, tell us if it works out for you.