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I am planning to upgrade my computer from Win ME to XP – are there any pitfalls I should be wary of?
I believe that Windows XP uses NTFS rather than FAT 32 which is what ME uses. Will my hard disk have to reformatted before I install the XP upgrade or does it convert my file system? (How would I change my file system anyway?)
Thanks for your help
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First things, XP is NOT NTFS by default, you must tell setup that you want to use it. I have not used NTFS as I dual boot and would like to see this (XP) partition as well.
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That is interesting, it looks like I need to know more about the history of XP, I assumed, being based on NT architecture for resource handling etc, XP would have NTFS by default, obviously that is not the case. I am planning to get XP Pro because that is the only version Visual Studio.NET will run on.
In spite of the risk of starting a riot – what is the main benefit of FAT32 vs NTFS – I would like to learn something (not start a fight 
)
Thanks for your help
Don’t want to start a riot, eh? I’m all for learning but there are rabid fans of both camps. This is one topic that always elicits debate, it’s rather like saying that Apple sucks at the Macworld festival. 
In a clean install, NTFS is suggested but not force fed. In home situations I personally lean towards FAT32 because I have no need for the extra features that NTFS enables – not because it’s a better file system.
Check out this recent thread regarding the differences. If you search the lounge using the terms FAT32 NTFS, you’ll see a ton of discussions that go into detail (and hopefully the battle of the baddest file system can stay there for once 
). Here’s another similar thread to get you started.
In a nutshell, the pros and cons of each file system:
FAT32
Pros:
Lightweight (low overhead). Supports large hard drives and single partitions up to 32GB. Compatible across multiple versions of Windows. Very efficient for smaller partitions.
Cons:
Inherently insecure. Does not support fault tolerance. Extremely large partitions are not supported and cannot be formatted in FAT32.
NTFS
Pro:
Very secure. Native to Windows NT/2K/XP. Supports on-the-fly compression to save disk space. Better recovery in the event of power failure/system crash. Smaller cluster sizes mean less wasted disk space. Small files can be stored in the MFT for quick access. Fault tolerant.
Cons:
Can be a little too secure. You can lock yourself out of it if you’re not careful. A smidge slower in some instances than FAT32. Cannot boot into a working command line environment to perform maintenance or repairs without a third party utility ($$$). Requires a fair amount of overhead to use (this is why you can’t format a floppy with NTFS).
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AOL or MSN
[/indent]Ugh, are those my choices? {{shudder}} 
To my knowledge though, since NT 3.5 and 4 did not offer native support for FAT32 you could not use it with either of those incarnations of Windows. There was a third party tool that allowed NT 4 to read and write FAT32 partitions from SysInternals but I haven’t kept up on the NT side as much – more like avoiding it if possible. Was FAT32 support offered in the latest service pack (6a)?
Agreed that it could be clearer that XP does not require NTFS – in fact, I had a bad experience with XP’s version of NTFS, which modifies the NT4 version of that file system and makes it impossible to use most disk utilities.
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