windowsXP_reinstall1
the recent SP3 for WinXP refused to install correctly...and, on closer inspection, the culprit was a borked registry. lesson learned: don't run "registry cleaners" that remove "unnecessary registry keys" willy-nilly...
so, a fresh install of XP. not so painful this time around, as i've been religiously backing up my documents and settings to my external drive...so after the reinstall, it took no time to get back up and running. also, it gives me a chance to triage all the apps i install, and really whittle it down to the bare bones essentials.
one stumbling block of the whole upgrade: my motherboard needs its own SATA drivers...helpfully provided on floppy, but i've since chucked my FSDs out. so, the XP installer didn't see any harddrives at first, which was a bit of a bummer...but gave me the opportunity to finally look into building a slipstreamed XP install CD - with the SATA, LCD screen, mobo chipset, etc drivers - with nLite. very nice not having to disk-jockey on first install just because vanilla XP doesn't know my mobo's USB controller and such...
windowsXP_reinstall1
the recent SP3 for WinXP refused to install correctly...and, on closer inspection, the culprit was a borked registry. lesson learned: don't run "registry cleaners" that remove "unnecessary registry keys" willy-nilly...
so, a fresh install of XP. not so painful this time around, as i've been religiously backing up my documents and settings to my external drive...so after the reinstall, it took no time to get back up and running. also, it gives me a chance to triage all the apps i install, and really whittle it down to the bare bones essentials.
one stumbling block of the whole upgrade: my motherboard needs its own SATA drivers...helpfully provided on floppy, but i've since chucked my FSDs out. so, the XP installer didn't see any harddrives at first, which was a bit of a bummer...but gave me the opportunity to finally look into building a slipstreamed XP install CD - with the SATA, LCD screen, mobo chipset, etc drivers - with nLite. very nice not having to disk-jockey on first install just because vanilla XP doesn't know my mobo's USB controller and such...