XP In Place Upgrades are fantastic (on most occasions)
A few days ago I visited a client because they were about to begin installation of a new industry specific stock control and ordering database system onto their computer.
They wanted to replace their existing system with new hardware and in the process, upgrade from XP Home to XP Professional, as the new software required Professional.
The client wanted to retain all customisations and installed programs etc but on new hardware with the different XP version.
This is usually very straight forward…….however…
I could in-place upgrade from home to home onto the new machine when migrating the license but cannot in-place upgrade to professional, even after going from XP home to XP home on the new hardware without entering Windows to begin the upgrade. (ie. cold boot)
While technically possible, according to Microsoft documentation, I could not follow through. In order to initiate the upgrade to Professional I would have to do it from within the windows environment as opposed to cold booting from the XP Pro Retail install CD.
During the install where the time estimate was at 34 minutes, I would get blue screen messages that differed on each attempt.
A clean install of XP Professional worked fine along with a variety of other program installs, but the In-Place Upgrade would not complete.
This was not a faulty hardware issue or a SATA driver issue :-/
A clean install with manual transfer of documents and settings is what the customer ended up with, an acceptable compromise I guess.