Formatting

[sierra01]

Can someone give me the idiots guide (simplified version) to formatting my PC and reinstalling XP please?

[lor]

Can someone give me the idiots guide (simplified version) to formatting my PC and reinstalling XP please?

Just put a real XP disc in the drive and reboot. You should be able to boot from the disk. During the instalation process it will show your current instalation and ask if you want to keep it. Just say NO and follow all the prompts. One prompt will ask if you want to reformat the whole drive and create a new Partition. Select this and your drive will be wiped clean and XP installed new.

Chris

[sierra01]

Thanks Chris, that sounds simple enough. I bought my computer in Thailand nearly 2 years ago now, with pantip versions of XP and Office. Besides not being able to keep both of them updated with all the patches and updates because they're illegal copies, the PC has various glitches and problems that have promted me to start again and go legal.

One other thing, for £65 on Amazon I can get XP with SP2B and an upgrade voucher for Vista, or about £50 without the voucher. Is Vista the way to go, or should I stick with XP for a while longer? I have a stand alone copy of IE7, but I don't like tabs, I prefer IE6, and Vista has IE7.

I can't afford to buy Office so today I downloaded Openoffice, I haven't given it a proper try yet but it doesn't seem that much differnt from Office, and it's compatible.

[Thaising]

Stick with XP, early adopter of vista will definitely face bugs and hotfix.

[farangsay]

Stick with XP, early adopter of vista will definitely face bugs and hotfix.

Seconded.

Last time I went and bought a Windows version upgrade too

soon after it came out I regretted in spades. After a day I

had to go back to the previous version , which is a pain when

it's the operating system you're talking about and a double

pain when the version you've got up is full of bugs.

Re: Office. A few years ago I bought Office pro student

version. A neighbour's girl who was at uni bought it for

me. Just had to send the money and a photocopy of her

student card. Don't know if they still do this but I paid

about GBP90 versus shop price of GBP700.

[Guest Reimar]

MS still sells "Academic Edtitions" of Windows and Office. With an valid Student or Teachers ID you should be able to get this versions.

Anyway, if you need to re-install XP and you have the same version as perviously installed it's a quiet easy job to do. But this is usefully if you want to "repair" your existing Winfoes!

Boot from the CD, the first screen will a option to repair, don't do that just hit [enter], the next screen should be the EULA sdreen where you have to hit F8, do it and on the next screen should come agai a option "repair" and here hit the R key and windows will startup with repairing (delete, copy, install) but keep all installed programs and settings.

This method will save some time.

[sierra01]

Stick with XP, early adopter of vista will definitely face bugs and hotfix.

Seconded.

Last time I went and bought a Windows version upgrade too

soon after it came out I regretted in spades. After a day I

had to go back to the previous version , which is a pain when

it's the operating system you're talking about and a double

pain when the version you've got up is full of bugs.

Re: Office. A few years ago I bought Office pro student

version. A neighbour's girl who was at uni bought it for

me. Just had to send the money and a photocopy of her

student card. Don't know if they still do this but I paid

about GBP90 versus shop price of GBP700.

My Son is at college parttime so I'll ask him to find out about any discounts he can get, thanks farangsay.

[lor]

I know the advice about waiting a bit before jumping on Vista is true BUT I run XP Media Centre Edition and I am led to believe that Vista will be a big improvement on this. So closing my eyes and jumping over the cliff, I will be installing Vista as soon as it is released here in Thailand.

Chris

[Clipped]

just a sidenote, when installing xp it will ask you whether to 'upgrade' or 'new install'....do the 'new install'....as sometimes the hacker for the pirated version of xp will lock your drive down if the upgrade option is selected....then you will have to reformat from boot detection.

[Gary A]

If you have the latest version of XP the re-install will be easy. Not long ago I had my computer worked on in the local shop and the guy reformatted my hard drive and installed a pirate copy of XP. When I discovered that it was a pirate copy and not my legal copy I tried to do the re-install and I got the message that the copy on my computer was newer than the version I was trying to put back on. I ended up having to destroy the partitions before I could put my legal version back on. I had to let the computer download all the updates overnight. It took a LONG time to download all the fixes and updates. I won't even consider Vista for at least a couple of years. By then they may have most of the bugs worked out and everything will be on the disk.

[sierra01]

Oh dear, problems!

I've backed up everything I want to keep so that's ok, but it won't let me reinstall. With the genuine XP home disk in the drive on start up I get a screen giving a list of operating systems, XP pro (illegal copy) and XP home (legal). I enter for XP home but it then tells me it can't find <windows root>\system 32\hal.dll. and to install it before continuing. I can't find that either.

Can I just format drive C and install XP home then?

Remember, I did ask for the idiots guide simplified version!!!

[nikster]

I know the advice about waiting a bit before jumping on Vista is true BUT I run XP Media Centre Edition and I am led to believe that Vista will be a big improvement on this. So closing my eyes and jumping over the cliff, I will be installing Vista as soon as it is released here in Thailand.

Chris

yeah... i am trying Vista on my second partition and it's annoyed me enough that I went back to my trusty XP. Vista's prettier but I really do not enjoy giant dialog boxes with three paragraphs of text in each option. Or the way Wireless Connection management is significantly more complicated - XP is a dream against Vista in this respect.

I expected bugs - there were none. I expected crashes, driver problems - nothing. I expected great graphics - true.

What I did not expect is that many things are way more complicated than before. I did not expect to spend so much time answering questions upon questions from Vista when all I want to do is get some work done ... and surf thaivisa of course...

[sierra01]

Problems solved. i went looking on the net for info about the DLL, and it told me how to fix it, just change the boot order so CD is first, I did that and the format and install went fine. Thanks everyone.

[sensei]

Microsoft is just about ready to release Service Pack 1 just a few days after the release of Vista...

more patches will be coming soon!

I'm sticking to XP for a loooooooooong while