CompTIA A_ Certification All-In-One Exam Guide, Seventh Edition - Michael Meyers [225]
Upgrade Advisor You would be hard-pressed these days to find a computer incapable of running Windows XP, but if you are ever uncertain about whether a computer you excavated at an archeological dig can run XP, fear not! The Upgrade Advisor is the first process that runs on the XP installation disc. It examines your hardware and installed software (in the case of an upgrade) and provides a list of devices and software that are known to have issues with XP. Be sure to follow the suggestions on this list.
You can also run the Upgrade Advisor separately from the Windows XP installation. You can run it from the Windows XP disc. Microsoft used to offer the XP Upgrade Advisor on its Web site, but searching for it now will just redirect you to the Vista Upgrade Advisor (more on that later), so running it from the disc is the way to go nowadays. Here are the steps.
1. Insert the Windows XP installation disc. If Autorun is enabled, the Welcome to Microsoft Windows XP screen appears. If this does not appear, select Start | Run, enter the following, and then click OK:
d:\SETUP.EXE
(Where d is the drive letter for the optical drive.)
2. At the Welcome to Microsoft Windows XP screen, select Check System Compatibility to start the Upgrade Advisor. On the following page, select Check My System Automatically.
3. In the Upgrade Advisor dialog box, select the first choice if you have an Internet connection. If you don’t have an Internet connection, select No, Skip This Step and Continue Installing Windows. (Don’t worry, you aren’t really going to install yet.)
4. Click Next. The Upgrade Advisor shows the tasks that Dynamic Update is performing, and then it restarts Setup.
5. After Setup restarts, you’ll be back at the same page in the Upgrade Advisor. This time, select No, Skip This Step and Continue Installing Windows, and click Next. The Upgrade Report page appears next. You can save the information in a file by clicking Save As and selecting a location.
6. Read the findings that the Upgrade Advisor presents. If a problem was found, click the Full Details button for instructions, and be sure to follow them. When you have recorded any necessary instructions, click Finish.
Booting into Windows XP Setup
The Windows XP discs are bootable, and Microsoft no longer includes a program to create a set of setup boot disks. This should not be an issue, because PCs manufactured in the past several years can boot from the optical drive. This system BIOS setting, usually described as boot order, is controlled through a PC’s BIOS-based Setup program.
In the unlikely event that your lab computer can’t be made to boot from its optical drive, you can create a set of six (yes, six!) Windows XP setup boot floppy disks by using a special program you can download from Microsoft’s Web site. Note that Microsoft provides separate boot disk programs for XP Home and XP Pro.
Registration Versus Activation
During setup, you will be prompted to register your product and activate it. Many people confuse activation with registration, but these are separate operations. Registration tells Microsoft who the official owner or user of the product is, providing contact information such as name, address, company, phone number, and e-mail address. Registration is still entirely optional. Activation is a way to combat software piracy, meaning that Microsoft wishes to ensure that each license for Windows XP is used solely on a single computer. It’s more formally called Microsoft Product Activation (MPA).
Mandatory Activation Within 30 Days of Installation Activation is mandatory, but you can skip this step during installation. You have 30 days in which to activate the product, during which time it works normally. If you don’t activate it within that time frame, it will be disabled. Don’t worry about forgetting, though, because once it’s installed, Windows XP frequently reminds you to activate it with a balloon message over