You shouldn't have troubles just doing an upgrade of XP Pro.

You should be ok if you do an upgrade. If you do a wipe and replace you may not be able to install any of the bundled software like that for DVD authoring. I needed to get a special account from our hardware vendor to gain access to this stuff. (We buy cheap OS laptops and then upgrade them to Pro because we get OS upgrades included with our Uber annual MS license agreement).

You may be able to get them to ship you a blank drive instead of one with XP Home and save some money. Maybe.

Barring that I would personally format the drive before installing XP Pro, unless there was bundled software on the XP Home install that you wanted to keep.

The reason why I would do this is more about trying to eliminate any unneeded (possibly wonky) OEM software and/or agents of any kind.

First I would go to the web and find the appropriate and most current OEM drivers from the manufacturers of hardware in the laptop - the motherboard drivers, audio, video, LAN, touchpad, etc. Whenever possible I try to get the system drivers from the actual 1st party vendor rather than the brand of the laptop - say ATI or nVidia for your video drivers rather than Dell or HP. Burn 'em to a CD or make them available on your home network, etc.

Install XP Pro to your drive using the format disk option instead of the upgrade option. Update XP to the latest service pack. Update, delete, or otherwise secure IE however you normally do that.

Install your drivers as needed. Install Firefox, antivirus and/or firewall. Install your applications and utilities. Tweak your settings and config to taste.

Done.

However, a nice thing to do at this point is to make an actual "disk image" snapshot of your current config, which often saves you the work of doing all of this over again and turns a marathon OS/app install session into a matter of popping in a disc and twiddling your thumbs for 20-60 minutes.

It's your own system recovery disc, customized for your applications/drivers.

Basically it copies the contents of your drive bit-for-bit and provides you a way of doing a complete system and data backup to a single file, as well as a way to copy this file back to your drive in a single easy action. This saves all kind of time and aggravation down the road.

I hear good things about Acronis, but I personally like using the older version of Norton Ghost* (version 9.x or earlier) which runs from a boot disk outside of Windows.

(*Please for the love of all that is holy do NOT install Norton antivirus, System Works, System Commander or any of that stuff. I do not endorse those applications fee-extortion viruses. Try Nod32 from Eset or Panda Antivirus. When I say "Norton Ghost" I mean the fine product called "Ghost" that Norton bought some years ago and had the good sense to not change much until v. 10, which is criminally icky and should be avoided.)

Ok guys, thanks. BTW how is Firefox 2.0 these days? I know EJ had some issues. Any other news?

I'm personally waiting for them to push FF2 as an update before I install, just to give 'em a little time to work out the bugs and let my numerous extensions/plugins catch up.

Jeez, Loq, leave us some job security, willya? ;-) (And +1 on the Acronis mention.)

I am using FF2 and it tastes like soup to me. I'm pretty pleased so far. It took a few (slightly painful) hours to get used to the new theme (still not sure if I like it) and the close buttons being in a different place. There are new versions of Greasemonkey and AdBlock Plus that work with FF2. The only extension I'm waiting on now is SwitchProxy, but I can live without that.

As I was writing this I noticed that there was a new version of AdBlock Plus. I installed it and restarted and didn't lose the part of the comment I had already written, which was nice. It hasn't crashed yet and it seems to be more well behaved with regard to memory usage.

I haven't used the Windows version, but I can't imagine it's much different than the Linux version.

I presume you do not plan to use that copy of XP Pro on another machine at the same time, because that would be teh illegalz (if it is a single-license key). You may also run into validation issues with Windows Genuine Advantage, but I'm just guessing at that.

I love "fee-extortion viruses". I had to basically rip Norton out of my stepmother's hands when I customized their new computer recently (I now recommend the Dell Decrapifier strongly, BTW). Her thought process was "Everyone I know uses it, so it must be better than this AVG thing I've never heard of." My (inspired, if I do say so) response was, "Yes, and doesn't everyone you know complain about viruses and how slow their computers are?"