Upgrade Problems
You will encounter many of the same problems performing an operating system upgrade that you do when performing a clean install. To review, these problems are normally related to the following:
Insufficient hard drive or partition sizes
Memory speed mismatches
Insufficient memory problems
Incompatible device drivers
In addition to these basic installation problems, upgrade operations can encounter problems created by version incompatibilities. New versions of operating systems are typically produced in two styles: full versions and upgrade versions. In some cases, you cannot use a full version of the operating system to upgrade an existing operating system. Doing so produces an Incompatible Version error message telling you that you cannot use this version to upgrade. You must obtain an upgrade version of the operating system or partition the drive and perform a new installation (losing your existing data).
You must also have the appropriate version of the upgrade for the existing operating system. (For example, Windows 98SE comes in two versions - one upgrades both Windows 95 and Windows 98, but the other version upgrades only Windows 98.)
To determine the current version of a Windows operating system running on a computer, click the My Computer icon, select the Properties option from the pop-up menu, and select the General tab of the System Properties window.
Test Tip
Know how to display the current version of Windows information for a system.
This article has covered how to isolate troubleshooting operating system problems to the area of setup and offered guidelines on correcting these problems. By reviewing this information and paying special attention to the "Test Tip" boxes, you should be well prepared for questions on Objective 3.2 in the exam's Core Hardware module.