Well, it was bound to happen. After years of peaceful existence with the "tech guy" at the school I work at, now we are at odds. We just recently had improvements made to our school network and we are now all forced to use this thing called "active directory" Sounds great, students and teachers can access anything of theirs on any computer in the school. Wonderful, but no.

I have (and have had) for 4 years, a computer in my classroom running XP Home, and now that we have this "active directory" thing, my computer needs to be changed over to XP Pro. In the words of our tech guy "I have a bunch of Pro network licenses, and one of them needs to go on your machine" The next words are what really got me. "I can install it on your machine, but you'll lose everything you've got on it. You can't just upgrade from Home to Pro"

As I said, I've had this computer for 4 years. I've loaded all sorts of programs, some I still have the disks, some are long gone. I have 4 years worth of documents, spredsheets, student quizzes, graduate school papers etc. I know that I can get all this stuff off with a flash drive, but the thought of having to reinstall all my programs, download all the others, and still not have everything back the way that it was, because some stuff I'm sure I won't be able to get again, annoys the crap out of me.

Is there anyway that this can be avoided. I've even offered to buy this machine and use it at home, and let the school use the money to buy a machine running XP Pro. No soap there. So now I have a week to "say goodbye to my XP Home running machine" I know that once XP Pro has been installed, she just won't be the same. Am I overreacting, or not reacting enough.

If there's nothing I can do, then just some kind words during this time would mean a lot.

Thanks.

Your Tech guy is full of it.
There is a very simple upgrade route from Home to Pro.
Just boot up your computer, throw in the Pro CD and follow the upgrade prompts from there.

Ps This will only work with a FULL XP CD and not a Restore CD.