Microsofts windows xp upgrade center
Is a good place to start.
Note their minimum requirements are a 300MHz processor and 128MB of RAM.
I have heard of folks who installed on significantly lower specs successfully ; but it should be noted that this would be quite slow.
In fact, I feel that you do not really get full performance until you have a minimum of 512MB of RAM and 1GHz Pentium or equivalent.
So can you do it? Yes. Will it be as fast as your current operating system? No, XP is more demanding and more complex and thus will be slower than Win98 on any given machine. Adding more RAM will make a very big difference if you move to XP, but it will still be frustratingly slow some times with an older processor.
While win2k is less demanding than WinXP , it is still more demanding than 98 and will likewise be slower.
It is however more secure once you get all the patches installed, and offers multiple user accounts which are real and seperate.
Personally, I generally recommend that folks stick with the OS their computer came with. Is this an OEM (like compaq) which has a hidden recovery partition (generally accessed by tapping F10 on boot up ) ? Why do you not have a windows cd? Is this how it came?
I would likewise suggest ebay or a swap meet or used PC store to buy a cheap copy of win 98 (say one from someone whose computer died and they just threw it out and bought a new one).
I normally recommend that if you feel you must have the new os, you get a new computer to go with it. This way you have one designed to run the os and do not have any problems with incompatible hardware (a common problem when "upgrading" an older machine to xp) which must be replaced at an additional expense. In fact; once you include the cost of a windows XP cd (if you do not have a win98 cd, you will want a full install version not an upgrade, since if you later have to wipe the drive and reinstall the upgrade will not work if you do not have at least the install cd from your previous qualifying os or buy a second hard drive so you have a dual boot and can retain your existing installation to allow you to later reinstall XP on its drive if needed), additional ram, replacement of non supported hardware etc; you often spend as much as you would have just buying a nice new fast computer.
