Win Xp Re-install so the HDD in my sisters pc died so I purchase a new hdd disc easy enough installed the drive but my Xp disk is to scratched to use, so I borrow a friends copy of XP to install ( using my code ) worked flawlessly up until I was doing the dreaded update cycle of doom when all of a sudden...one of the security updates disabled the internet...thinking nothing of it I restarted the rig when promt... windows booted as normal...only now after the XP splash screen...the screen goes blank...totally nothing on it...but the monitor is receiving input ( aka it doesn't go into standby )...getting annoyed I decided to boot into safe mode....nope cant do that either as my mouse and keyboard do not work at the safe mode longin screen im getting rather frustrated at this atm...but my sister is adamant to keep XP... looks like ANOTHER reinstall is on the cards...
I'd probably use something like nlite to slipsteam all the post SP3 updates and a disk with SP3 already on it...
IIRC his sister is insisting on it and won;t listen to reason... [he posted about this elsewhere on the forum]
yeah fortunately sister saw the light...and we ditched XP for.... ahem vista... was the only OS I had lying around that hadn't been used ( after all who would WANT vista )
Vista is a good system, used it for years without problems... however, using it on an old laptop is not really a specially good idea as it is resource heavy. One of the first things to do is to adjust the shadow copy parameters to a specific size, rather than an endless % of hard drive space. This is done is command prompt and looks something like this: vssadmin resize shadowstorage /on=C: /for=C: /maxsize=XGB where X is the number og GB you want allocated. I recommend nothing lower than 2GB and anywhere up to 10-15% of your available hard drive space. This command is a must because if you have something like a 250GB drive it will use up to 15% (37.5GB) of your drive for shadow copies. This is crazy and has been changed in Win 7 to 5% which is a lot more sane number. Other than this, Vista is solid and good, but keep in mind her computer will probably become kinda slow pretty fast.
I never really had problems with Vista, but workingclass has a good point about the drive usage. I got a tech support call from a friend of mine not too long ago regarding that very issue. On his laptop, it had nearly filled up his storage drive. In the three years or so that I actively used Vista on my HP desktop, the only BSODs I ever saw came from exiting the same game. Once I figured out the steps required to cause it and avoid them, it was smooth sailing from there on out. Still running it on that machine, just don't get on it that much these days.
