Upgrading from XP Home to Pro on a toshiba lappy

[dkmech]

A colleague of mine is trying to upgrade windows on a Toshiba Satellite 1800-712 laptop.

When he called toshiba to ask about it some of the support people said it is not supported on that model and he needs to buy a new laptop if he wants pro, but others said it can be done. They told him the bios upgrade that he needs and he installed it, but is now having problems with blue screens and the like. He is gonna try use a recovery cd to check if it is still ok.

However he does want to get it upgraded in the end. There is a toshiba partition on it, which should probably be wiped to then install windows from scratch, but there is a concern about getting drivers for all the devices.

I am not quite sure why toshiba say u can't upgrade from home to pro as i would imagine drivers should be the same for both of them.

Did anyone attempt to do anything like that with a toshiba, or maybe a different laptop and do you have any advice. Any sites you know which might have info on drivers for it? Any suggestions welcome.

[Captain Fizz]

You can get all of the drivers from www.toshiba.co.uk
The rebuild should go OK. It's Compaq that have the sys partition which you REALLY shouldn't delete. (Sometimes the BIOS is stored on the HDD... But Tosh's should be OK)
And why not just install Pro - It would be a lot better than upgrading IMHO. (Fresh build)

[dkmech]

I think he is fine with whichever way it takes, i meant upgrade as in change it rather than literally upgrade.

[Captain Fizz]

Ahh.

If the laptop can take XP Home, I cannot see any reason for it not taking Pro.

We have XP on all of our lappies in work - Including Tosh's. (Except the sub 400MHz ones)

[BUFF]

I can't see why he can't run Pro if it can run Home - I wouldn't have thought that a BIOS flash was necessary either.
There is no MS upgrade package from Home to Pro though - he would need a full licence.

[dkmech]

I think its just toshiba being *********************************. As they are the ones to modify ram so that only their ram can be used for upgrades. How low can you go? Well, apparently crucial are on the case and are trying to haxor that