Upgrade or Full XP

I've just recently converted from Win2000 to WinXP.
Decided to go for the HomeXP upgrade option because of the vast difference in price between the upgrade and full versions.
Got home with the CD and thought I'd see if I could boot from the CD rather than run the upgrade from the Win2000 desktop .. was surprised to find I could boot from the CD.
Backed up everything I wanted saving from my Win2000 setup and rebooted onto the WinXP CD .. chose to do a format from the options and waited for the installation to come up with an error message telling me I had no qualifying Windows OS .. installed with no problems through to completion.
Are good old Microsoft ripping us off in getting us to buy the full version of WinXP at twice the price of the upgrade version, when the CD from the upgrade version does the full upgrade with no problems.

Hmmm....always made me put my 98se disk in before it would do anything , yours went through without it ?

Actually their not ripping people off , just charging what they feel is a fair price for an OS to people who haven't yet bought one.

I think that buying the upgrade and finding a way around the Qualifying agent is a whole lot better than going totally illegal...but I'm sure M$ feels otherwise :rolleyes:

There's three kinds of people in this World...The straight and Honest who never deviate....The straight and Honest who deviate....And the Honestly not straight deviate-rs

M$ understands all three :D

Welcome to the forum TheTechGuy. Post often as we love a challenge..

I have done both a full and a upgrade and I did get the question for the previous OS on the upgrade. Maybe since you tried the upgrade CD before you formated the HDD the upgrade for XP Home saw Win 2000. I did mine on a clean formated HDD before the upgrade CD had a chance to look at the HDD....
What do you think?

Just had to rebuild again after making the mistake of installing SP1 .. clean install after complete format .. once again, no question of checking for an existing OS.

Well then..... You may be the recipient of operator error from the factory, that is you could gotten a copy of the full version put into an upgrade packege.........:D

Look for a file called Setupp.ini that is present on your Windows XP CD and double click on it and browse its content. There is a field called PID=. This PID is what would tell us exactly what we have got.First 5 bytes of PID decide whether (it is OEM or RETAIL or is an UPGRADE ) and last three digits determine what kind of CD KEY will it accept. Here are some of the typical PID values:
Retail = 51882 335
Volume License = 51883 270
OEM = 82503 OEM

Source: XPTuneup Tip 7

Found the pid file and copied this ..
[Pid]
ExtraData=70747366656E6D756973AC4DB41510
Pid=55285000

Does this tell you what I have . ?