95 to 2000 upgrade

I will be migrating a bunch of PCs from 95 to 2000 for the first time ever.

Is there anything I should look out for or know ahead of time to make sure all goes smoothly????

Thanks

Yeah, be prepared to reload 2k from scratch. That may be required on several of them..., as the upgrade should not be considered a perfectly reliable solution.

What are the machine specs? 2k needs a lot more horsepower than 95 did.........

I am unsure of the specs, I am helping a friend out at work and I have no for-knowledge of these PCs.

Sounds like a pre deployment assessment is in order...

It could be messy, if it works at all!
I would HIGHLY recommend noting all the hardware in each workstation and pre-downloading the Windows 2000 version of the drivers for each, and burn to a CD if you can.
That way you will have them handy when you need them - and you WILL need them.

A clean install would be the best, but like said above, make sure these workstations can handle a bigger OS. (No 486!):eek2:

Thanks for the advise

When we are talking about corporate environments, I would have to say call someone who knows what they are doing. This is not the time to learn how to do this. DO not get me wrong, I am not saying anything that should be flameworthy. Only that this company has a job to do and if computers are a tool that is used for its job, then it should be done right and as quickly as possible.

Windows 2000 is nothing like Windows 95, there are security issues, domain issues and hardware issues all of which are more complex than 95 could even hope to achieve. Not only that but afterwards you will have to train the secretaries and other users on how to login, work, and what to do with certain error messages.

If you were doing this for home study, go ahead and knock yourself out. But put yourself in the shoes of that office manager, would you want to trust your network migration to someone who is asking how should you do it?

Here are some steps to consider:

Hardware Assessment (find out what hardware you have in all pc's, printers, scanners, etc.)

Software Assessment

Security Assessment (and do not fall for the "they do not need security", Windows 2000 gives it to you whether you want it or not)

Server Assessment (what additional changes are required on the servers)

Internet Assessment

Time Assessment (when do you have to finish this job, and again, you may feel that you have all the time in the world, but every office manager will eventually what the job finished, so you need a true time allotment)

Your first time should never be at the expense of someone else.

If I have misunderstood your question, again I am not trying to be flameworthy just honest and upfront.

Make sure you have:
-at least 128M RAM
-at least 3GB HDD
-at least 300MHz CPU
...otherwise those machines will be crawling. It would also be a very good ideea to get a list of the hardware in those PC's and make sure everything is supported under Win2000 (especially video and network cards). Also as Ya-know said be prepared to load from scratch with drive format (many times the apparent long way is the shortest. If the hardware is identical in several machines you might want to ghost them. Download all the updates for Win2k (starting with SP4 and IE6-SP1) and then just deploy them with a script, that will save a lot of time.

Hi Gang,
That was very sound advice from both CeeBee about the specs and smoke wolf about the know how. Clearly if you are asking how to do it, you are most likely not the guy for the job.

I actually worked on Windows 2000 for the first 2-3 Weeks of my career at Microsoft. We were testing Windows 2000 as a consumer upgrade to Windows 95!,a,b,c and Windows 98. After ~3 weeks into that project they scrapped the idea, because most of the upgrades were ridden with problems and also, because they foolishly decided to continue to make two OS's instead of one, something they quite possibly never should have done. Although I'm willing to admit that Windows NT made an excellent experiment for NT (New Technology). That being said Windows 2000 generally doesn't upgrade 9X systems very well. My team was then moved to the Windows 98SE project which grew from the Windows 98 SP1 project. Clearly they should have called it Windows 99, but heh whatever :). I think it needlessly created tons of confusion, but they kept changing the name while we were working on the project it was Win98 Special Edition, but everyone knows that means "watered down piece of caca".

Regardless of the OS it's always preferable to re-install. You should run the Windows Compatibility analyzer for Windows 2000. I'm sure it can be downloaded off of www.Windows2000.com.

OKay I just looked and it would seem that there are two useful pre-installation compatibility utilities one for hardware and one for software:
1. Hardware2.
2. Software

CeeBee was right about ghosting if they are the same systems it's worth creating an image and writing it to all of them. Of course afterwards you'll have to update the serial numbers. If you have Ghost Enterprise I believe this task is automated for you.

Cheers,
Christian Blackburn

It's my personal opinion that rather than creating a whole nother operating system (Windows NT) as an experiment they should have just used the operating system Windows (3/9X) and experimented individually with one component at a time. That way the main code base would remain strong and have more developers scouring the same code base.
Cheers,
Christian

Quote:

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Originally posted by seier
It's my personal opinion that rather than creating a whole nother operating system (Windows NT) as an experiment they should have just used the operating system Windows (3/9X) and experimented individually with one component at a time. That way the main code base would remain strong and have more developers scouring the same code base.
Cheers,
Christian

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Win 3.x & 9x(Me) are flawed from design and lack the features required in enterprise environments. NT-based operating systems are by far more robust & reliable.
Obviously you have never programmed, otherwise you would have known that messing with one component at a time when the whole system is bad rather than starting from the scratch will only cause havoc (see the "progress" from Win95 to Me, which is the worst of all). Fortunately they got smarter and phased out the 9x series starting with XP.

Just to be clear, I am working with someone on this, not getting a contract to do it. It has already been decided from my friend that they are doing this. He just needs some help with it. I am quite certain that he has done his homework regarding this, I just wanted to know if there is anything I should watch out for when doing it.

Like I said, I don't have many details about the job though.

Having just gone through the headache of migrating about 80 PC's that were upgraded to Win2K from Win98 from an NT based domain to an AD domain, I agree with Seier and Smoke Wolf completely. Do not upgrade those PC's to Win2K.

Basic, but bring a W98 boot disk if you go with clean install.

It may be out of your hands, but we had a few critical programs that ran just fine on 95/98 but failed horribly on 2000 with the same version. (payroll - not me). Back to the image we took.

Hi Machineman,
I hate to state the obvious, but I trust you did try using the Windows 95, 98, and NT compatibility layers?
http://www.ntcompatible.com/faq-15.html
Cheers,
Christian Blackburn