text: i am operating on me and would like to upgrade to xp. will i loose anything from my pc if i do this?   hey no problem .. if u have  atleast two drives in ur system ur data wont be lost except ur installed softwares such as msword ..  be sure u do back up(copy paste ) ur valuable datas to the d drive or in to other drive  i think ur os sits in c drive.. copy all ur data to d drive. now restart ur system after inserting ur winxp cd. the system runs the set up files for win xp. at the time of installing ur xp  shows eg.. c   150000mb     d    126548mb wat u have to do is place the cursor on c drive and press d . this will delete all the files in the drive. after deleting  the screen looks like free 15000mb d      11256mb now place the cursor on free space and press enter the next question will be about formating choose ntfs (for better performance) and press enter now the system starts installing the winxp.