upgrading from win 95 to win 2000

Is it difficult to upgrade my sony vaio desktop currently running win 95 to win 2000 or higher? Any problems I may encounter? Will I lose my internet connection settings?

 

Before you do the upgrade to 2000, you will want to check to make sure that you will have drivers for all your hardware and your computer meets the requirements to use 2000.

 

I am in the midst of doing the very same thing - attempting to upgrade from Win95 to Win2K Pro - and I discovered one MAJOR problem:

If you have a 3Com NIC card in your computer, you have to remove it from your hardware profile and uninstall all the associated software!

I didn't know this, and my Win2K install got to the point of the last reboot, which booted me into the beginnings of Win2K - and then crashed, with a completely cryptic error message. Using someone else's computer, I looked online for information about this, and found the warning about the 3Com NIC card. I couldn't get far enough into Win2K to do the uninstall, so I attempted to reinstall Win95 - but Win2K had already gotten enough of a toehold on my machine that it would not boot into Win95, no matter what I tried. I wound up having to format C: and reinstall 95 on the formatted drive. (At least I did have a backup of all my files.)

I'm still in the "fresh" copy of 95, as I make absolutely sure that I have all the downloads I'm going to need for Win2K. Among these is the updated software from 3Com, which I will need in order to reactivate my NIC card after I install Win2K. (Without the NIC, I have no connection to my DSL service, and therefore no Internet access at all.)

Wish me luck...

 

Well, this is sort of my farewell to the Win95 forum - I have finally succeeded in installing Windows 2000 Professional on my computer!
It was not without trauma. I removed the 3Com NIC from my hardware profile, and deleted all the software relating to it, but Win2K kept failing with the same error message relating to a 3Com driver file. I physically removed the card from my machine, but the same thing kept happening. I even installed a completely different NIC - a NetGear product this time - but Win2K kept loading the 3Com driver program and then failing. I phoned 3Com tech support, and got an intelligent, clueful, and friendly person. He told me that I had to clear the settings in my BIOS. I had already looked in my BIOS, but I didn't find anything mentioning network interfaces or other hardware, besides the very basic stuff. However, the 3Com guy told me to find "Reset System Configuration" and set it to "Yes ", and reboot - and that worked! I was able to install Win2K cleanly...
...and spend two more days installing all the software and getting things back to a configuration I can live with ;-)

Thanks to everyone here who has answered my questions patiently and informatively. Now I'm off to the Windows 2000 forum!