CompTIA A+ Core 2 (220-1202), Domain 1, Objective 1.2 focuses on the planning that must happen before an operating system upgrade: protecting the user's files and preferences, confirming that applications and drivers will still work, and verifying that the hardware can actually meet the new operating system's requirements. Skipping any of these steps turns a routine upgrade into lost data, broken software, or a machine that will not boot.
In this article you'll learn how to back up files and user preferences before upgrading, how to evaluate application and driver support and backward compatibility, and how to confirm hardware compatibility against minimum requirements so the upgrade succeeds the first time.