Choosing to Upgrade or Refresh

   

A basic decision is whether to upgrade or to perform a new installation. Upgrading refers to leaving the existing Windows NT 4.0 (with Service Pack 5 or later) operating system on your computer and updating it by installing the new Windows Server 2003 operating system. A new installation means completely removing the previous operating system or installing a product in the Windows .NET Server family on a volume that has no previous operating system.

Reasons to Upgrade

Especially for small organizations, doing an upgrade rather than a new installation can make sense. Generally, with an upgrade, configuration is simpler, and your existing users, settings, groups, rights, and permissions are retained. And with an upgrade, you do not need to reinstall files and applications. As with any major changes to the hard disk, however, you should back up the system before beginning an upgrade.

See the following resources for more information:

  • Regarding upgrading, see the Windows Server 2003 online Help and Support Center section "Operating Systems from Which You Can Upgrade" within the topic "Upgrading Compared with Installing."

  • If you are upgrading in a domain that includes domain controllers running Windows NT 4.0, see the Help and Support Center topic "Upgrades in a Windows NT 4.0 Domain."

  • If you want to upgrade and then use the same applications as before, be sure to review applications information in Relnotes.htm (in the \Docs folder on the Setup CD). Also, for the most recent information about compatible applications for products in the Windows Server 2003 family, see the software compatibility section of the Microsoft Web site (http://www.microsoft.com/).

Reasons to Perform a Clean Installation

There are good reasons to perform a clean installation rather than an upgrade ”especially when dealing with large organizations. If you reformat your hard disk and then perform a new installation, the efficiency of your disk might improve (compared with not reformatting it). Reformatting also gives you the opportunity to modify the size or number of disk partitions to make them match your requirements more closely.

If you want to practice careful configuration management ”for example, for a server where high availability is important ”you might want to perform a new installation on a server instead of an upgrade. This is especially true on servers on which the operating system has been upgraded several times in the past.

It's possible to install the Enterprise Edition and also allow the computer to sometimes run another operating system. Setting up the computer this way, however, presents complexities because of file system issues.

More Information

For more information about using multiple operating systems, see the Windows Server 2003 Help and Support Center topic "Deciding Whether a Computer Will Contain More than One Operating System."



   
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Introducing Microsoft Windows Server 2003
Introducing Microsoft Windows Server(TM) 2003
ISBN: 0735615705
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2005
Pages: 153

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