Hi
I am hoping I will be able to install windows 2000 onto my computer (which I have been given) that currently uses windows 95, is it possible?

http://www.d-a-l.com/help/showthread.php?t=1688

As long as you purchase a new licence of Windows 2000 for the PC, then you may be able to install Windows 2000 as an upgrade over your existing Windows 95 installation. However, it will be much more reliable if you wipe your existing programs and data and install Windows 2000 from scratch. That will mean having a backup of any data that you may have stored on the PC already and also making sure that you have the installation CDs for any other software that you have the legal licences to use on that computer.

If you'd like any advice on where to get Windows 2000 from, please let us know what country you are in.

Windows 2000 is quite a demanding operating system. As your PC is currently running Windows 95, that probably means that it's pretty old and, therefore, may need to be upgraded in order to be able to run Windows 95 well. Although Microsoft's line is that the minimum requirements are a Pentium 133MHz PC with 64MB RAM (memory), in reality, you don't really want to be running Windows 2000 on less than a Pentium III 500MHz with 128MB RAM (or more) if you want good performance.

Hope that helps

Thanks very much

Assuming I get all licenced copies of programs I want to use which would include
Windows 2000 with an upgrade in memory as this one has 64MB how much do you think it would cost here in UK? I suppose I just need to know if it would cost more or less than the price of a new basic computer and whether its worth doing.

Thanks
Rachel

As your PC has 64MB RAM, I'm guessing that it's at least 5 years old. Even with a memory upgrade to 256MB or 512MB RAM, any brand new PC that you could get would significantly out-perform your old PC.

However, to answer your question, take a look on the D-A-L Trader section of this site (click the 'Auctions' tab at the top of the screen) and you'll see that you can pick up 256MB of second-hand RAM as cheap as £10. New SDRAM, which is probably the type that your PC uses, is much more expensive than it used to be as it's old technology that's now only sold in low quantities - 256MB would cost around £60 or more.

To know exactly what type (and speed rating) of memory your PC can use, you should run the D-A-L Online Hardware Scan (see the link in my signature). The Online Hardware Scan will report on what parts are fitted inside your system so that we can say for definite which upgrades would work. This would also allow us to confirm that the rest of the PC is good enough to run Windows 2000.

To get a second-hand licenced copy of Windows 2000 (a genuine Microsoft CD and the necessary Certificate Of Authenticity or 'COA'), you should probably budget around £40. A new sealed copy from a trader such as myself would be just over £100 and a retail boxed copy from somewhere like PC World would be over £200.

Hope that helps