Microsoft Windows XP Professional Administrators Guide

Microsoft and computer manufacturers work together to ensure that new computers are ready for Windows XP. If Windows XP Professional comes preloaded on new computers that you purchase, you will not have to worry about the installation of the operating system or the computer hardware's compatibility with Windows XP. However, administrators that must support computers running other versions of Windows will need to perform a number of tasks to verify that the computers that they support can be upgraded to Windows XP Professional. In some cases computers can be upgraded without any changes to their configuration. This will probably be true for many recently purchased computers or computers that are already running Windows 2000 Professional. In other cases computers may require additional memory or disk space in order to support an upgrade. Depending on the age of the computers that are supported, many computers may not be candidates for upgrade. This will be true of older Windows NT Workstation, Windows 95, and Windows 98 computers that were purchased early in the lives of these operating systems.

Table 2.1 outlines the hardware requirements of various Microsoft operating systems including Windows XP Professional. As you can see, the hardware requirements of Windows XP Professional are substantially higher than that of Windows operating systems built on the Windows 9x kernel. Windows NT Workstation 4.0 also has very modest hardware requirements. However, Windows Me and Windows 2000 Professional systems have significantly higher hardware requirements making it possible for computers running these operating systems to be more easily upgraded to Windows XP Professional.