Curse Of The Recovery CDs
Fred: I'm a relatively new subscriber, but I have found LangaList Standard/Plus to be invaluable.
I run a computer room for a treatment group of disabled veterans at the local VA hospital. The hospital doesn't support our computing activities. (We're not even supposed to have a computer room.) We rely on donations when we need to replace one of our old PC's.
Recently, an HP Pavilion P4, Win XP Home was given to us. I've been checking it out. Win XP isn't behaving properly and I would like to reinstall it. Unfortunately, the donor couldn't find the recovery CD's.
Is there anything I can do, short of purchasing a new copy of XP? I've downloaded Bart PE for trouble shooting purposes. I know how to make the boot CD. Could it help somehow?
I look forward to each edition. Please keep up the great work. ---Alfred Bowman
There *may* be something you can do, depending on what's on the hard drive of the sick unit. If there's setup/recovery info on the hard drive somewhere, these may help:
Miss Your OS CDs? Me, Too!http://langa.com/newsletters/2001/2001-01-15.htm#4
Creating a Windows CD from a Recovery Disk
http://langa.com/newsletters/2001/2001-11-19.htm#2
Wiping Out Special "Recovery" Partitions
http://langa.com/newsletters/2003/2003-02-06.htm#1
If there's no recovery info on the hard drive, then there's not much to work with. You can try uninstalling all nonessential apps and utilities from the hard drive, cleaning things up as best you can (eg http://langa.com/newsletters/2002/2002-04-04.htm#2 ), running a good Registry cleaner, and defragging the drive. With the garbage cleaned out, the system may behave more normally.
If not, then as a last resort, you might try this: Use a tool like the free "Everest Home Edition" http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=everest+home+edition or free Belarc Advisor http://www.belarc.com/free_download.html and make note of the license number for the current XP install. Then, using a setup CD from another source, try a reinstall but use the original license numbers when the setup asks for them. That may or may not work, depending on the exact setup, but if it does work, it's completely legal and ethical.
If that fails, then you're pretty much out of luck with that original copy of XP. As price is a major constraint for you, I'd suggest you look at a free Linux distribution running a free office suite (eg Open Office: http://www.openoffice.org/ ). It'll be close enough to what you're used to so that you'll probably be OK, with a bit of a learning curve--- but you can't beat the price. <g>
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