Upgrade

Here's the results of my recent upgrading session, which is the precursor to my overall goal: a six-operating-system monster featuring Windows 98, XP Pro, three flavors of Linux, and a final OS as yet undetermined:

Windows 98SE --> Windows XP Pro - A good change, if only for the fact that XP handles XML WAY better than 98 ever could. I got sick of having to restart Yahoo, Winamp, and Firefox everytime the rendering engine went kaput.

Photoshop 7 --> Photoshop CS - The only barrier there was CS required XP. Now that I have XP, I have CS

Goldwave 5.12 --> SoundForge 7.0, ACID 4.0 - Talk about an upgrade! My audio editing will now be MUCH easier with this combo of programs. SF handles recording, and ACID is beautiful for multi-tracking and mixing. Sweetness.

Firefox 1.0.7 --> Firefox 1.5 Beta - When I installed the beta in 98, I lost my scroll bars, my options screen simply wouldn't render, and downloads were clipping themselves at just a few K instead of the Megs they were supposed to weigh in at. Now I have no problems, and can join in the chorus of "It's Awesome" with the rest of my fellow Geeks.

Now, mind you, I didn't upgrade 98 to XP in that sense. I put XP on a seperate partition on my primary drive, allowing me to keep 98 just in case something goes horribly wrong. That, and I wasn't sure if a Celeron 566 with 256MB of RAM would be sufficient to run XP. But once I saw Joker and Angel's machine (a Celeron 450 with 256MB of RAM) take it like a champ, I felt better and went ahead with the installation.

So far, so good. Now I get to download and install my Linux flavors, as well as the mystery OS I haven't decided on yet.