Upgrade or fresh install

My company is getting ready to roll all of our Win2k machines over into WinXP Pro. My recommendation has been to use the NIST checklists to harden the boxes and roll fresh installs, however, I am recieving the normal amount of flak about this and how much easier an upgrade would be to do.......

I want the systems to have fresh installs because of the job the OS does with cleaning the registry is not complete and have explained that the systems will be more stable than if an upgrade is done. Thier stance is simple 1-they do not want to do the work and 2- they do not want to have to reload the custom apps they have on thier desktops.......Anyone have additional bullets for my gun on this one?? I would like to hear from anyone who has suggestions on how I can strengthen my position.

Thanks

Well, Im sure for them price is also a factor becasue upgrades are alot cheaper. But if something happens to the box and you do need ot format then you would need a previously installed copy of windows installed. Clean installs dont take that much longer. It will rid the computer of any malware infestations, it will clean out the registry completly, it will save you the time of having to do a defrag (becasue after upgrades you sure want to do a defrag). Upgrading places system files on different parts of the hard drive instead of all at the beginning, this over time will create faster ware on the drives and slower processing times (yea its reaching but still a valid arguement) Upgrades are not as stable most of the time. Chances are its time for a format anyway since there are stats that say windows boxes should be formatted every year or so anyway (I dont believe this at all but its ammo if you can find the stats)

Well you are definately right...a clean install is the way to go.

Most of the issues I experienced were hardware related and driver issues...where the machine becomes unstable to the point of clean install. Nothing can fix it.....

Depending on the role of the WS...and what apps it will be running and how those apps will stress the hardware

I havent done any updates..although I get lots of home machines..which have been updated in this manner.....

I think the bullet will be the cost of troubleshooting an unstable machine, including user downtime, etc vs the time for a clean install.

Good luck :)

MLF

How many machines are you doing?

Are they planning to upgrade each individually or upgrade one and re-image the rest?

Unless all the machines are squeaky clean when you upgrade, the issues will most likely move over to XP.

It's like having your car painted without having the rust and dents fixed.

I have seen problems when doing an upgrade from Win2K to XP Pro. Many of the installed apps under Win2k simply do not work properly under XP Pro (nortons AV for one). Even when Nortons was unstalled first and then upgraded, and installed under XP Pro, it had problems.

If you have the time, you can try a few machines with the upgrade path and see how it goes. If there are any glitches, then I would scrap that plan and go for the fresh install.

While you are doing this, you can also do a fresh install on a few machines (if available) and see how much time it takes. Time does = $$ though.

good luck

~halv

There are currently over 1500 machines that will be upgraded. It will be a big project if they have to create an image, but that is what I am trying to have them do, because probably 90% of the machines are the same "Compaq" desktops.

With that many PCs their going to have to include tweaking time in their cost analysis for the upgrade option, probably lots of tweaking time.

Do the clean install on one box, do al the updates patches, install all the custom apps and then make an image out of it and shoot the image to everything else.

I'm not sure what type of logic they are using but it is obviously flawed as doing an image of one machine and then pushing that image to the rest of the machines would be the fastest way to do the upgrade.

Actually performing a system upgrade will take considerably longer than just imaging. I can have a system up and running off of a ghost image in under 30 minutes usually. That same machine could take 30-45 minutes to upgrade and another hour to apply the appropriate fixes. Not to mention all of the tweaking you will have to do on the system after the upgrade. You are probably looking at 2-3 hours or so per machine, not taking into account application issues, just to get the OS upgraded and working normally.

The biggest benefit of using an image to build all of the machines is that you are pretty much guaranteed that each machine will be identical. If you have properly secured the first machine, all of the rest of them will be secured.

So look at it this way.

45 minutes to reimage a machine*1500= 1,125hours, although some custom applications do not support being loaded through an image. We really need to know more about the custom applications you have mentioned as that is really the decisive factor. I can think of a few different applications that would have to be reloaded in the case of doing an image that would make the imaging process take longer.

3 hours to upgrade * 1500= 4500 hours, not to mention that the platform will not be as secure as something will get missed on probably 1 out of 3 machines, if not more.

Folks were talking about antivirus not working after an upgrade. That is because the .dll's that exist in the root operating system are different. So even though you are running sai Virusscan8.0 on NT4.0 it is not exactly identical to VS8.0 on XP. Most antivirus companies recommend uninstalling AV before an upgrade.

And another point about AV, specially Norton\Symantec....

You may uninstall it...but it stays in the registry...I have had problems with this and upgrading of the av on ws 7.5 to 8.1 where I just had to stay at 7.5..or spend a hour + removing from the registry.

MLF

MLF makes an excellent point. Symantec is to antivirus what AOL is to the internet.

Yes, Norton's can be a pain in the butt. I have used their nortons removal tool and it works sometimes, and sometimes not. I have a copy of it somewhere if anyone needs it, it is also on their web site.

~Halv

I would do a test batch........comparing upgrade to fresh install.....then compute the total cost of "upgrade/installation" and then pick from there....I'm thinking upgrade wouldn't be much cheaper and would be lesser of a time consumer for you to move onto other IT related projects