Terry's Computer Tips - Newsletter
October 10, 2005

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Volume 1, Number 17 -- Monday, October 10, 2005
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3

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6.  Upgrading Windows XP Home to Windows XP Professional

First, I have to say that you really need a good reason to do this.  In this particular case, the computer was going to be used by a child for remote access to her school's network.  The school had a Windows "domain controller" for access control to the network, which forced the use of Windows XP Pro.  That is one of the few reasons to purchase XP Pro for non-business use.

For home use, I recommend either Home or Professional, your choice, but I also recommend that you pick one and stay with it.  Home is a little more cutesy and has more functions hidden, and it is missing some of the more sophisticated networking functions.

Having said that, I recently upgraded an XP Home installation to XP Professional.  The upgrade process was smooth as silk.

First, as with any major change, I backed up your machine.  In this case, I hooked the machine up to my network and used Karen Kenworthy's Replicator (www.karenware.com) to copy everything to some available hard drive space.  Replicator will gracefully skip files that are uncopyable, such as the windows registry, by file copy methods.  Windows Explorer, on the other hand, simply stops at the first hint of a problem.

I did an anti-virus scan and an anti-spyware scans with Microsoft AntiSpyware (beta) and Spybot Search & Destroy, and then rebooted the computer.

My first thought was to boot the Windows XP Pro Upgrade CD.  Wrong.  There was not an upgrade option this route.  I needed to boot the installed Windows XP Home and then insert the Windows XP Pro Upgrade CD.

After inserting the XP Upgrade CD, it will autorun.  One of the options is "Install."  When I selected this option, I saw one of the smoothest Windows installations I have ever seen.  I had to put in the XP Pro product key, and, of course, I had to set up the time zone and such.  But, it was smooth, smooth and trouble-free.

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Creating a web site is fun.  Learning that others visit your web site is even better.  But, the web sites you can host for free at your Internet Service Provider are sorely lacking in space (10 MB limit?) and in functionality.

When you are ready for the next step, you need a web host that gives you plenty of space and plenty of throughput and no surprise charges.  I use Powweb for all my web hosting.

Powweb offers an extremely affordable web hosting package.    It's a great deal at $93.24 per year (average $7.77 / month).  The price even includes a free domain name for 1 or 2 year hosting period that you purchase.

Powweb's October Special -- buy 2 years and get 2 years free -- continues!  That is such a good deal that I bought a second package with this deal -- it is an average cost of $3.89/month.

How about a discount coupon code for October?  For use only with the "buy 2 get 2 free" special — You can get $5 off with the code "oct05" (without the quotes).

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7.  Data Recovery - You Hope You Never Need It

One of the articles I added to my Terry's Computer Tips site recently is about Data Recovery.  This point really struck home after Hurricane Katrina.

While we, personally, did not have significant problems from Katrina or Rita, our neighbors have had relatives from New Orleans living with them for the past six weeks.  While initial estimates were that it might take as much as 6-8 weeks to pump the flood waters from New Orleans, the task was almost completed before Rita came and attacked three weeks later.

Of course, homes and businesses lost computers that had been under water for days and weeks.  Their challenge at that point is "what do we do now?"

For the home user, it is probably time to throw your hands in the air and be happy you bought flood insurance.  [By the way, a loss like this - by water or fire - is one good reason to keep a manual checkbook and not use a program like Quicken as your only checkbook record.]

Your insurance company is going to evaluate your property and will probably "total" your computer, although they may insist on you attempting to get it cleaned up and fixed -- not necessarily a good idea, as this is going to be expensive to do right, and not many service companies are set up to do this type of cleaning.  Clean water is not the best solution, and even then the parts would probably require baking at low heat to remove the washwater.  Companies that specialize in such cleaning use specialized solvents to clean the circuit boards.  Some items, such as monitors, CD drives and DVD drives will be lost causes.

Hard drives become the interesting issue -- I would have expected these hermetically sealed drives (they do not let air in or out) to have survived ok.  Such does not seem to be the case.  Of course, the circuit boards on the outside of IDE drives would have the typical issue of other circuit boards.  Some drives, though, have a breathing hole which I assume has some type of membrane to protect the actual drive platters and read/write head from dust.  It seems that our PC hard drives, while resistant to air and dust intake at typical atmospheric pressure have a problem handling several feet of water on top of them.

For the small, medium and large businesses, though, the hard drives in the flooded computers may have irreplaceable data.  Even if the business followed disaster recovery planning to make backups and keep them off-site, those same backup tapes, CDs and DVDs could have been affected by the same flood of muddy water.  Recovery of the data on the accounting hard drive, the marketing/sales hard drive, the CFO's hard drive -- or any others -- may be critical to survival and growth of the business.

Read my Data Recovery article for more info on solving the problem.  Read it now, so it is tucked away in your mind, should you ever have the need.

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8.  Recommend Terry's Computer Tips to Your Friends

If you like my  Terry's Computer Tips newsletter, you can help me increase the number of subscribers to my free newsletter.  Recommend it to a friend.

Feel free to forward the entire newsletter to a friend or friends that you think would be interested, including all copyright notices and any advertising.

Don't forget, the current issue and the newletter archives are available online at http://www.terryscomputertips.com/archives/, and, of course, via a link from the navigation bar on each Terry's Computer Tips web page.

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9.  Send me some email to read!

I always have time to read emails from you -- the readers of Terry's Computer Tips.  I can not promise a personalized response, but I reply to many of the questions, tips, comments and feedback emails.  I also may use your email in my newsletter!

Send me your comments, send me your tips, send me your questions, and send me your feedback!

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Back to Part 1   Part 2

Volume 1, Number 17 -- Monday, October 10, 2005
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3

Copyright © 2005 Terry A. Stockdale.  All rights reserved.