Upgrade from Home to Pro-- & speed problem

[jepeters]

Is there a separate upgrade that takes you from Home to Pro? Going on-line and looking for upgrade prices shows descriptions from 98 to XP or 2000 to XP and costing close to $200. Is there a cheaper upgrade if you already have the Home version?

(The school where I teach belongs to a consortium that can buy XP Upgrade licenses for $50, and although these computers are used in the school, they are my personal computers, so I'm not sure about the ethics of using the school price in this situation.)

I plan on putting this upgrade on an HP Pavillion that runs VERY slow under HP Home (a celeron 2.3 ghz). If putting XP Pro on it doesn't speed it up any (I'm assuming it won't speed up, but I'll give it a try, anyway) can the upgrade be put on a new hard drive to be installed in this computer--or will it only install on a hard drive that has a previous version of windows on it?

[EzyStvy]

I'd fix the preformance problem before complicating it with another install.

Have you done all the spyware checks etc??

[glc]

Pro will not speed it up - what WILL speed it up is getting rid of all the useless HP preinstalled garbage and cutting your background processes down to a minimum.

You can install the upgrade on a blank drive, all you need is a CD (not a restore disk) for a qualifying OS to put in during the compliance check.

You are a teacher. I would think that academic licenses can be used on your personal machines to assist you in your job, if you want specific ethical guidance, ask your cognizant IT department.

[jepeters]

I have already gone in to msconfig and turned off almost all of the startup programs. Also ran AdAware and SpyBot and got rid of a bunch of stuff there.

I got 7 of these HPs in all (5 of one model, 2 of a slightly different model). They have all been slow--right out of the box, even with startup items removed. A couple got EXTREMELY slow at times. I would estimate that it sometimes took close to 5 minutes for a student to get logged on and get a program opened on one of these computers.

Anyway, I just took a 4-year old hard drive, installed XP on it and it runs circles around the original drive.

[noby]

do you have enough memory?

noby

[raftero]

don't know any reason other than glc suggested, however i have an old HP with a cely and 64 memory with me os and it starts up as fast as my p4 1.6a with xp pro, or my AMD 1.4 tb with w2k pro. something other than the os is causing the problem. i have 4 computers one with xp pro,others with xp home-w2k and me there is no noticeible difference in start up (a few seconds) on all.

[jepeters]

512 mb ram

I kicked a student off of one of these new computers as punishment and put him on an old HP 466 Mhz celeron. First thing he said was 'Hey, this computer is faster than the one I was on'. Both in starting up,logging on, and starting up programs, the 466 had the 2.3 ghz beat!