Despite blowing away your software, you can’t do an in-place upgrade with 64-bit Windows 8, even if the CPU is 64-bit capable.It’s really a clean install that saves all of your user files, but kills your applications.

An in-place upgrade of Windows 8 over Windows XP isn’t really an upgrade.

Still, I learned some things from this crazy little project: The 2GB of memory and the slow hard drives certainly made things drag, and the old CPU didn’t help, but the whole affair hung together much better than I thought it would.įew Windows XP users are likely to make the jump to Windows 8 by upgrading an existing XP system. Still, even discounting the GPU, the system seemed more responsive when running Windows 8. Then I had to repartition and reformat the pair of 250GB drives, and then run another image backup. I sighed, rebooted the system into the Intel RAID BIOS and deleted the RAID array. The only incompatibility I encountered was the RAID array. Windows 8 setup runs a compatibility checker the first time it’s activated. Even so, the Windows 8 setup retained none of my applications-only data files! Well, that was a rude awakening. So I resigned myself to installing 32-bit Windows 8. I first tried 64-bit Windows 8, but was informed that only a clean, fresh install would be performed. I uninstalled the license server and a few other applications, mainly to make the system small enough to back up to the secondary 250GB RAID array. In its original state, this P4-based system ran the 32-bit version of Windows XP–and the last time I used the PC was several years ago as a license server for 3ds Max 8. The Radeon 9800XT once offered the acme of graphics performance. As I’ll detail shortly, this system is a little problematic when it comes to Windows 8.Ībit IC7-G.

Vantec still makes low-cost peripherals, but it is no longer in the power-supply business.

Two 250GB Western Digital hard drives in RAID 1 mode.

Radeon HD 9800XT AGP graphics card with 512MB frame buffer.

Two 1GB DDR-400 DRAM modules (2GB total).

Abit IC7-G motherboard with Intel 875P chipset.

The components inside are more than just elderly–they’re positively geriatric by modern PC standards. I built the system in 2004, not long after the Northwood variant of the Pentium 4 shipped. Regardless, what lives inside the case is more interesting. You can pay good money for custom case painting, but this kind of psychedelic silk-screening seems to be unavailable in 2012. The good news is that you can’t order one of these enclosures any longer. But I built this machine when I was younger and more prone to admire tacky garishness. ‘Old’ isn’t quite the word for a system like this

Windows 8 socket 478