Unusual (?) ME to XP Pro upgrade question

Hi everyone. This is my first posting on this board.

After three years of minor problems with Win ME, my system has finally become near useless because of some registry errors and I'm now considering either reinstalling ME over itself in order to save myself months of customizations and tweaks, or reformat the drive and upgrade to XP Pro.

If I decide to upgrade to XP Pro, I'd like to also change the system language from Italian (my current OS, Win ME) to U.S. English.

My question is:

Can I buy an upgrade from the States and then reformat my drive and do a clean install of XP Pro? I know that XP Pro asks to inspect the CD of the previous OS before it installs the new system on a clean HD. But what are the chances that it won't recognize the Italian OS and tell me off?

Caren

 

Weak and indirect answer, by analogy. I installed Office (en) upgrade over Works with Word (it) quite a few times. Recognition of qualifying software works flawlessly. OTOH, I never really understood why some times I get Word dialogs in English, other times in Italian.


If you know you'll be doing XP only, you might pop for an OEM end-to-end disk and install that rather than sullying your HD with ME and its inferior filesystem (and perhaps having to do a double reinstall in the future). It's not that difficult to qualify for OEM. A new HD should be enough. Did you buy one recently? It may be worth doing. I have a friendly supplier in Ireland who accepted my self-certification of OEM status.

 

Thanks Christer and Filippo for your insigghtful replies and sorry I read them so late... I had no Internet connection for the lasst ten days. I've bought an OEM version of XP Pro in English and am ready to install it. I have some questions about that which I'll post in a fresh query as I suspecct this one has gone dry already
Thanks again,
Caren