[Tool] ConvertNT5SKUs - Convert Windows NT 5.x SKUs v3.0.0 (RC2)

You're right, but it achieves a similar results but with a very different path that could be OK from an IT maintenance point of you, but less from an engineering point of view.

With pre-Panther setup/upgrade technologies (aka i386/amd64, I don't know if there is a codename of this project), the in-place upgrade between x86 and amd64 has not been implemented (which is very cowardly and disrespectful), but there is a hope to achieve it. It's already possible using mixing of i386 setup files and amd64 source files to reach the point beyond less then 30 minutes to complete with some popup with errors to fix.

Using modern setup for Windows XP/Windows Server 2003, is another very interesting path, because it has been demonstrated to work (at least from Windows XP SP3) using Windows 8 BETA files.

 

MS failed from beginning not allowing a simple restore of home profiles simply coping them in the right place and adding an user with the same username/password, like it's possible since the dawn of time in Unix.

That's the big problem (at least it was).

Also remember that when XP 64 was released no one got it right (including most MS people), I remember that Palm said the Palm Treo smartphone was impossible to support in XP x64 (and in Vista) due to "technical limitations impossible to overcome", I made the needed drivers in 5 minutes.

It took literally years before most programs started to be compiled and assembled with x64 in mind. By that time XP64 was already forgotten by the few people who used it, indeed there were many things that worked in XP 32 and Vista/7 x64, but not on XP64, mostly because a line forgotten (or purposely removed) from some .inf

In that scenario is understandable that MS refused to allow an automated path.

Think to Antivirus or Antimalware, those needs kernel drivers, there is no way that in 2004/2005 an AV, developed for x86 only, would work in x64.

Think to printer drivers

So the main problem at the time was not migrating a bunch of normal SW and the user profiles, the problem was what to do with AV, Partitioning SW, low level tools, virtualization SW, and drivers.

The setup wold have had to inform that an huge list of SW wasn't going to be migrated (something that setup nowadays does, but for few MS programs and little more, like VirtualPC or WMC).

Then many AV required a reboot to get properly uninstalled, sometime that failed miserably (Norton, McAfee and Co. had some specific antivirus remover that basically worked the same way as the single virus removers).

So in that scenario offering a migration path would have been more damaging than useful (both for the MS reputation, and also for the time the user had to spend fixing broken things before and after a "successful" migration).

On the other hand a manual migration is free from dragged problems, and once you have moved the user profiles and imported them, everything else is a breeze, most recent SW works as is, some old school SW like Office need a re-installation, same for AVs mentioned above.

But is surely easier to reinstall the right AV than to uninstall the wrong one before an "automatic" migration

 

That's corporate-speak and usually means "We don't see a market for this".

 

I can acknowledge a deep engineering problem (where were the NT folks from DEC at that time?), but not about the fact that an OS should stay an operating system, or can you still call an OS something you can't upgrade ?

Meanwhile, one can accept the fact to firstly have to uninstall AV and others incompatible softwares. In regards to architecture change, it is somehow natural that all drivers should be installed to match the new architecture (amd64) and all old architecture (x86) drivers could be simply removed.

 

No doubt it was corporate speech, but it was just stupid.

The treo was still sold at the time, and given a random idiot (me) was able to make it working in 5 minutes, an ingeneer with the source code, the SDK and all the goodies at hand would have accompliched the task in even less time.

How many 600$ smartphones you have to sell to justify the time spent by that engineer? One, two?

 

I want to be anything but the MS attorney, but you can't say there wasn't an upgrade path.

We are 20 years past the release of XP32 and we still have an upgrade path, and probably for sure that upgrade path will see the next decade.

So where's the problem? Who really need to use x64 (even today)?

32 bits are faster in 90% of the operations, the supposed RAM limit never existed and anything that in 2023 is x64 only (Hyper-V, WSL, Deduplication, ...) didn't exist in 2004, and today is x64 bit only, just because commercial, not technical choices.

You know where the problem is?

The problem is that, at the time, many people (me included) were fooled by how good XP64 was.

Everyone (including me) thought that was because the x64 architecture.

Instead was that Windows 5.2 was a huge improvement over 5.1, we had no comparison, few normal people tried Server 2003 (x86), let alone XP52, so x64 looked like the holy grail.

It wasn't and it isn't.

Who use it now it's because is stupid/not informed or because the artificial limits (see above), but if AMD didn't come with the AMD64 architecture be sure that in 2023 we had still the good old x86 in any application, with *maybe* the IA64 relegated in datacenters and research centers (where 64 bit matters)

 

Nice. I did that in the early XP64 days, The Tablet part was fully functional but WMC was not (unable to watch TV on it)

The same seem still valid nowadays: installing x86 wmc on W8.1/10/11 AMD64, leads to a starting but not fully working WMC.

Is WMC installed following your method fully working?

 

Yep, same method I used back in the days.

 

Likely I didn't express myself clearly enough.

I'm not talking about switching architecture in place.

I'm talking about installing a fresh copy, then copying user profiles, program folders, alluser settings and alike, then importing the profiles manually (not that hard) or using forensit (dumbproof).

Obviously some old school programs (like Office) and some programs that needs specific kernel drivers (like AV or Virtualizzation SW) must still reinstalled.

But the vast majority of recent SW (like browsers, email client, games) will work "no question asked", and with all the settings/history/passwords already in place

The above is general no matter if you want to go to a fresh copy of the same OS, or if you are migrating from x86 to AMD64 (or ARM64) or viceversa.

P.S. Perhaps did you try to do an in place upgrade after you did what you described above?

 

Maybe not.

What about the P.S. above?

 

I use the inf file to install components such as Movie Maker, and there is also no entry in the start menu.

 

I convert NT 5.2 Server x64 to Client x64 and install Games through Games.inf (zh-CN) file. Monitor with Total Uninstaller. The registration form is attached. I couldn't find a registry entry for adding it to the start menu.

 

Monitoring shows that .lnk shortcuts are created in the "C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Start Menu\Programs\Games" folder.