[Silound]

If you plan to upgrade to Windows 8 right at release, don't bother doing anything right now. Win8 will release sometime in November, and there's no reason to go through the ~4hour process of installing and updating Windows XP just to install Win8 in a few months. Come to think of it, there's no reason to sit through an XP install, period. If you absolutely must do a fresh install, pick Windows 7.


Back up your files to another device prior to migration! There is always a chance that files can be lost. There is no more secure way to back up files than to have another copy somewhere. Be wary of Microsoft's migration tool. It is very powerful, but if you don't specify certain things, it will only copy files it finds in Microsoft-created folders (My Documents, My Music, etc). Some people store their files in other locations, some programs save files to the program directory. Be sure you know exactly what files you want to save and where they are located. If you have to, use search to make sure you find files and copy them out. You can connect an external hard drive or even another computer over the network and simply copy all of your files from your computer to the other device with a simple copy and paste. Make sure you can open all of your files on another computer prior to doing a wipe. Losing data sucks!



I do NOT recommend any of my clients partition hard drives anymore. Partitioning was a common practice 15 years ago when storage options were expensive and people required multiple operating systems to run on one computer. There is virtually no performance gained by partitioning for the average users, and if something were to destroy that partitioning table, it is more painful of a process to restore. Hard drives are very cheap, and most modern motherboards will support a boot-loader that lets you pick which hard drive (thereby which operating system) you wish to boot to.


I will agree, a Solid-State Drive is an amazing thing for boot times. Unfortunately, the price/performance curve is not worthwhile to the average user unless you feel you absolutely need to boot in under 20 seconds.