I have an emachine that died on me. So I bought a refurbished HP DC7600 to use. It came with Linux but most of my programs require XP. I tried using Wine in Linux, but was only compatible for one of many software that I use. Is there a way to transfer my old XP from my emachine and transfer it into the HP even though my Emachine has one of those recovery disks with XP in it? But it would never ask me for a registration key to activate it though. I would hate to have to purchase another xp cd and key since Micosoft is no longer going to use XP by 2014. Could I transfer via USB/HDD? Extract the XP from the recovery disk?
some members have used oem disks from 1 brand of computer to another brand so give it a try. might run into drivers issues which can be fixed but if you get a bsod then need either a hp recovery disk for that computer or a retail xp disk. black market xp can be found on the net. doesn't that hp have a 2nd partition on the hard drive that has the recovery windows on it? watch your post screen before it loads linux to see if gives you option for system recovery by pressing f10 or something like that. which one is yours in this link? http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/...=en&lc=en&tmp_docname=&tool=&query=DC7600#N21
Well since I didn't have any important data on it, I just decided to fresh wipe and installed it and see what it did. Luckily everything worked which was surprising. The only issue I am having now is finding the right audio driver for my externals. Oh and the only hint that bugs me about it is the fan. My old emachine's fan was loud on startup, and before my oem install my hp as quiet, now when it starts up it sounds just like it, like a car starting up. Hahah. Oh well, if anything happens, I only spent 20 bucks on the hp, it has more ghz and ram than the emachine. And the other issue was that IE wouldn't work, but I just installed Firefox on it do no troubles.