Forum Home
Press F1
Thread ID: 30600	2003-02-25 03:45:00	Windows XP woes	Dylan (800)	Press F1

Post ID	Timestamp	Content	User
123699	2003-02-25 03:45:00	Ok this is a long story i thought i'd share will you all. One hell of a weekend! I decided to upgrade from windows Me to XP. I used my dads corprate version so registration was not required. I wanted to do a 'clean install' so I went ahead with formating my drive. I later found out that a 'clean' install still required a earlier version to be installed so windows Me was installed again (i later found out that you could run i386/winnt.exe). I finally started installing windows XP. The installation was easy and straight faword. Once XP was installed i started up. It was like magic, it detected all my hardware except my Sound Blaster Audigy. That was easily fixed installing the drivers of the CD. I was pleased with the results so far until i went to use the internet. It could not use the modem with the vendors drivers (Dynalink) so after hours of fustration I decided to use a standard 56k driver. Success at last and i was on the internet. I then went on installing Battlefield 1942. I then upgraded to the latest patch and ran the game. The was slower than expected so I ran 'msconfig' to try disable some unnesscary programs/services. To my suprize there were about 25 checked items on the services tab and another 15 on the programs tab! I disabled all the unnesscary programs with no improvment. I then tried disabling them all. The game ran quite smoothly however there was no sound! I had all the latest drivers so I decided it would be much easier to switch back to Windows Me. I tried formatting c: from a boot disk however ms-dos could not read the NTFS file system. I tried using partition magic to format however it reset (spontaneously) half way through the format. You could now say i was proper f**ked. I could not start windows nor reformat. Later i took my hdd up to my friends house, plugged it in and tried to format it. I could not for some reason unknown so i ran up my good friend peter. He said i should be able to get a program to do a low level format. My bios did not have the option of LLF so i took my hdd to peters house. After about half and hour of juggling IDE cables we finnally got the hdd to read properly. I then attempted to copy the files i needed from a partitioned d: drive to his hdd for backup. for some odd reason it was copying at a speed of about 1mb/s. Obviously this took a long time to copy all the files i needed to his hdd (i think about 4 hours for 7gb). I then downloaded the utility needed to do a LLF so went home and formated the driver. This took about 2 hours for a 40g hdd. Finnally i could reinstall windows me but it wasn't over there. I forgot to format to fat 32 and it had only formatted to fat 16 so only 2gb of my 40g was avalible. I reformatted (again) to finnaly have my drive the way it was (minus the partitions). If any of you are thinking of upgrading to XP my suggestion would be to stick with what you've got. Unless you like little pretty animations everywere its just a resource hogger.	Dylan (800)
123700	2003-02-25 03:57:00	Don't knock it, Dylan. It kept you occupied all weekend. I'm sure you weren't bored, and you didn't get into trouble, or spend lots of money on junk. And you've got a nicely defragmented disk, so Win Me should run well. :D	Graham L (2)
123701	2003-02-25 04:18:00	Oh dear.... reminds me of some of my early experiences with XP... personally I hated the thing. Am running W2k Pro now, and the stability just blows be away. Can honestly say I never had a problem! Anyway... am a big fan of "if it's not broken, then why fix it??" Oh well... give it time... you will eventually be dying to run it again just to say you've got it on your system. ;) Pretty animations and all! :D Lo.	Lohsing (219)
123702	2003-02-25 04:49:00	I Must say that having experienced both XP and 98 I prefer 98 faster and leaner , XP shines in multitasking and utilising the ram properly but its a resource hungry O/S that needs 1.5 gigs of HDD alone	kiwibeat (304)
123703	2003-02-26 03:07:00	I dont know what you guys are on about.... ive got xp pro sp1 and never had a problem with it.... About all the bells and whistles... you can turn all them off.... Get rid of the fisher price colors and animations.... There are a number of site on how to tweak xp with great results... I have made near a dozen registary changes.... and my system works briliantly.... and stably... The thing with windows is it assumes alot of things..... Dont let it.... Tell what to do.......!	h_l_devil_69 (3240)
123704	2003-02-26 03:22:00	Just because you've had one bad experience doesnt mean its like taht for everybody. Ive had about 4 GREAT experiences with it at home, drivers all picked up etc. You could have used FDisk if it was on the boot disk (It should have been if it was a ME disk). deleted a "Non-DOS" partition. Try updating drivers for certain things, like graphics card etc. that'll improve stability and playability. Graham's right too... I bet you stayed out of mischief over the weeked ;-)	Chilling_Silence (9)
123705	2003-02-26 03:34:00	Sorry Dylan but it is not very bright mentioning here that you were pirating software you could get your dad into a heap of trouble. It is also not a very good idea to low level format a modern hard disk as you can stuff it. They do that at the factory.	mikebartnz (21)
123706	2003-02-26 05:03:00	I do think XP is a good operating system however its not for me. I have settled with windows Me (i know most of the tweaks, options, etc). As for piracy i thought it would have been perfectly legal since my dad uses this computer as a 'home office' when hes away from work. In any case my computer is running smoothly. That LLF made quite a difference (i have no figures to back this up, but apps load noticably faster).	Dylan (800)
123707	2003-02-26 06:09:00	Correct me if I am wrong,but I understood that if you walked into a shop and bought two compus. that M/S require you to purchase two copies of say XP.	Thomas (1820)
123708	2003-02-26 06:21:00	I think that you should have been able to run windows Xp setup and used format within the set program. Doesn't ME also have the same thing?	nicnz (2273)
1 2