[ale] How does one migrate from SuSE-9.3 to -10.x?

[johnmills at speakeasy.net (John Mills)]

ALErs -

SuSE-9.3 works pretty well (even 'very well') on my low-rent Fry's laptop,
but I would like to move to -10.2 for some newer packages. I would
naturally like to migrate with as little distruction as possible of my
configurations and settings.

Is there a clean update path, or am I better off to just backup my
personal directories (obligatory anyway, unless your risk tolerance is way
higher than mine!), reinstall Linux from scratch, then recover my files?

TIA.

 - Mills