So last week I was asked ‘what is a normal question?’
I do upgrades and repairs primarily on XP Systems. Why XP? Installed base. There’s hardly any software out there that won’t run under XP Pro x86 SP 3 except for stuff deliberately designed for other operating systems.
What other operating systems? Well you may think I’m talking about Mac/Linux issues, but Microsoft offers other operating systems. You’ve heard about Vista and 7 and there are infinite flavors of them to confuse you, but there are also ‘Business’ oriented variants starting with NT and “progressing” to “improvements” like XP-64 and Server 2008.
The primary characteristic of all these pieces of crap is that your old programs don’t work any more and your user interface changes and you have to learn a new one.
Are you doing something different with your computer than you were a year ago, or would you just like it to be faster?
Unfortunately Microsoft stopped supporting XP about a year ago and it is kind of vulnerable to crankiness like resource hog ‘anti-virus’ programs that behave more like viruses themselves.
Some of these things can be fixed, especially if you can boot from a utility drive (and everyone should know how to build one), others not so much. The utility environment can do pretty much anything you need to do on the computer, you customize it at your own peril because it’s intended to be reloaded on a blank drive any time you don’t trust the 2 or 3 you have on hand for just such emergencies.
And that may sound like throwing hardware at the problem, but a 16 Gb Thumbdrive can be yours for a mere $30 if you don’t have stacks of old hard drives like I do in which case you will want one of these $25 parts. The point is to get a utility drive you can boot from to take control of the computer and USB is a good and portable way to handle most modern desktops and laptops.
Next week- Installing XP Pro x86 SP 3, Part 1
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