1. HDD shouldn't need any additional ventilation.
2. Get XP, IF you make sure your Compaq 5000 has XP drivers available for it on Compaqs site for the basics like video, audio, onboard nic if it has one, modem, etc...some like Dell even have chipset infs that must be installed for XP support. This is common good practice for older machines that were around before XP was released. A common mistake many folks make is assuming any older machine will run XP and then find they don't have driver support after they install it. I don't deal too much with Compaq so I would recommend you check their support site. If they have them, download them and burn them to cd BEFORE you begin replacing the OS...
[tab] said:
In the good old days you could buy an upgrade of version of MS Windows and use it to do a clean install, as long as you had the discs for your old version... is that still the case?
Yes that is true. Some folks misunderstand the terminology about "upgrade". You can purchase a Windows XP Upgrade version in either Home or Professionial version for far less than the Full version. This requires you to have a previous version of a MS OS like 98SE or ME cd available. This does not mean you should then take the XP upgrade cd and stick it in the cd drive and do an in place, on top "upgrade" of your running ME to XP. This will be the biggest mistake you could make, and one that generates a lot of business for me
. Microsoft never perfected the "one OS on top of another " upgrade process. So by all means, buy the XP upgrade version if you have your original ME cd, then blow away your ME installation with fdisk. Obviously back up any docs or other data you will need. Then put in the XP cd, boot from it, partition drive how you want it then format drive using NTFS or FAT32, enter your XP product code, then wait for it to ask you for the "previous OS version" that it cannot find, since the hard drive is freshly erased. Take out the XP cd, put in the ME cd, it reads the magic secret data it needs to confirm you have a qualified previous OS version, put XP cd back in, then it proceeds with the XP install. Your "upgrade is complete" and you didn't shell out double the bucks for the full license version of XP, and you didn't try and turn a mucked up ME install into an even more mucked up XP install... hope this helps...
Jim