Here you will find links and tools to help you decide if Windows XP is right for you. What it is compatible with, and how to install it safely.
Do you need Windows XP? I asked myself the same question when I first learned about it. At the time I was running Windows 2000 Professional on a very stable machine. I was happy with my PC. For the most part, most users who have upgraded are happy, but for some there have been hurdles and hiccups upgrading to Windows XP. If you do make the decision, be prepared! Get all the information and drivers you will need beforehand. This website and many others should get you started. Also, read the Windows XP FAQ. This should help you if you make that decision as well, and avoid trouble.
The first thing you might need to do is determine if your existing hardware is compatible with Windows XP. Microsoft has a excellent search engine designed to do just that. Keep in mind though, the hardware listed is most likely hardware that has been through Microsoft's quality testing and is not a true indication of what does work with Windows XP. If you have any doubt, please post a forum question and someone will answer you.
Once you have your CD and are ready to make that great leap of faith, you will need some guidance to get everything installed just right.
These two links offer great HOW-TO articles for both Windows XP Home and Professional editions.
If you have done your research and followed the directions and tips, you should have a very enjoyable upgrade experience. granted, you will run into problems, but most can be fixed. Remember this website and use the forums. Someone probably has run into a problem you are having, and has a fix for it. Welcome to Windows XP.
NTFS vs. FAT32
There is no easy answer to this one! Undoubtedly unless you are dual-booting with another Operating System, or need to use DOS then NTFS is the only way to take full advantage of Windows XP's security and stability. If outright speed is your main requirement, then FAT32 is slightly faster on all but the largest drives: however both NTFS and FAT32 can be tweaked for speed by altering the Cluster size
FAT32
FAT32 is an enhanced version of the FAT file system that can be used on drives from 512 megabytes (MB) to 32 GB in size. FAT and FAT32 offer compatibility with operating systems other than Windows XP. If you're setting up a dual-boot configuration, you should probably use FAT or FAT32.
If you're dual booting Windows XP and another operating system, choose a file system based on the other operating system, using the following criteria:
Format the partition as FAT if the installation partition is smaller than 2 gigabytes (GB), or if you're dual booting Windows XP with MS-DOS®, Windows 3.1, Windows 95, Windows 98, or Windows NT.
Use FAT32 for use on partitions that are 2 GB or larger.
It's recommended that you use NTFS rather than FAT32 for partitions larger than 32 GB
For information on the limitations of FAT32 go Here
NTFS
The NTFS file system is the recommended file system for use with Windows XP. NTFS has all of the basic capabilities of FAT, and it provides the following advantages over the FAT and FAT 32 file systems:
1. Better file security.
2. Better disk compression.
3. Support for large hard disks, up to 2 terabytes (TB).(The maximum drive size for NTFS is much greater than that for FAT, and as drive size increases, performance with NTFS doesn't degrade as it does with FAT.)
If you're using a dual-boot configuration (using both Windows XP and another operating system on the same computer), you may not be able to gain access to files on NTFS partitions from the other operating system on your computer. For this reason, you should probably use FAT32 or FAT if you want a dual-boot configuration. . There are programmes available that will make NTFS partitions accessible under Windows 98/ME.
More general info...
Speed
NTFS and FAT32 are very similar in speed, but as the size of the disk increases, the gap widens. NTFS actually stores small files in the Master File Table (MFT), to increase performance. Rather than moving the heads to the beginning of the disk to read the MFT entry, and then to the middle or end of the disk to read the actual file, the heads simply move to the beginning of the disk, and read both at the same time. This can account for a considerable increase in speed when reading lots of small files.
Journaling
NTFS is a journaled file system, meaning that it keeps a journal of all changes made. If you lose power in the middle of writing some data, when the machine comes back up, it can roll back changes, according to its journal. This doesn't necessarily mean that you won't lose any data at all, but it means that if part of the MFT is corrupted, it can be fixed.
If the same thing were to happen to a FAT32 partition, and part of the FAT were corrupted, the partition would be unmountable (unreadable), and you would lose everything on the disk.
Security
FAT32 offers no security whatsoever, whereas NTFS offers very good security. All files and directories can be secured with a great degree of granularity. You can specify who can read, write, list, and change files, read/write permissions, read/write attributes (read-only, etc.), and a few others. The thing to keep in mind here is...all of this security is easily circumvent able with a Linux boot disk. Physical security is the most important security.
Compression
A commonly-used feature of NTFS is file compression. Many people have the idea that compression is bad, because of the way most compression is done. In Windows 98, for example, if you compressed a drive, it would take everything on that drive, and put it into one big file, using a special driver to make it look like all the files were still separate. This saved a lot of space, because there was no more cluster slack, but it also meant that if any part of the file got corrupted, all your data was gone. NTFS compression is far better. It compresses each file individually, and is extremely efficient. It's so efficient, in fact, that you will sometimes see better performance from a compressed NTFS volume than an uncompressed volume. This is due to the fact that more data can be read in a given amount of time, and because the OS is very efficient at decompressing it on the fly.
Disadvantages of NTFS
While NTFS is recommended for most Windows 2000 users, it is not appropriate in all circumstances. Disadvantages of NTFS include:
NTFS volumes are not accessible from MS-DOS, Windows 95, or Windows 98. The advanced features of the version of NTFS included with Windows 2000 are not available in Windows NT.
For very small volumes that contain mostly small files, the overhead of managing NTFS can cause a slight performance drop in comparison to FAT.
