Paul wrote in news
The next topic is backups. Do you use backup software ?
Do you have an external drive to store backups ?

I'm not really worried about backups from the old machine to the new
machine.

All my software was downloaded off the net except for Microsoft Office
which I just checked on WinXP is MS Office 2007.

My data is just my email which is in Google Gmail so it's still there, and
my pictures and some other files but they're all easy to back up onto a
flash drive so I'm not at all worried about the data that is on the old
WinXP machine which must be 15 years old or something like that.

Maintaining a computer is easy, if you have backup
images. If you make a mistake, you can restore from
backup. The size of the image, is only as large as
the size of the file set. So if you had a 2TB drive
with 300GB of files, the backup takes 300GB of space.

I'm on the old Windows XP machine which has a Pentium M 1.7GHz processor
with 1GB of RAM and a 200GB HDD with almost nothing left.

I right clicked on the one directory I care about if I was going to bring
it over from WinXP Home to Win10 Pro where it finally stopped counting at
less than 100 GB(50K files).
https://s4.postimg.org/xqc1eu6xp/winxp_data.gif

In that example, you'd need a 500GB drive for the
external storage media, as a convenient minimum size.

Free backup software is available. When prompted, you
do want to make the emergency boot CD, which helps
if you entirely ruin the OS on the hard drive :-)

http://www.macrium.com/reflectfree.asp

There are many times in the past when I could have used that!

But now, I'm probably not going to keep the old Windows XP machine, even
though I love the ease of use of Windows XP.

The 100GB of data I can move over at any time but most of it is almost
certainly garbage anyway so I'm not worried about any old data.

I have always been good about keeping my data all in one place so that is
not a problem. I've also always been good about saving all my downloaded
programs that I use to install software I care about, so that's not a
problem either.

The problem really is just how to best start fresh on Windows 10, which
seems, already, to be extremely different than Windows XP (and a lot harder
to figure out).


Yes, the CNET download is clean... The emergency
boot CD can use one of four WinPE versions, and
WinPE5 or WinPE10 should be good for most purposes.

*******

Just in case I need it for Windows 10, I will save that installer in my
location that I save all my installers.

Thank you.