The tale of the 2012 PC dust-out & XP install from hell...

Long story short… PC slowed to a crawl thanks to Firefox and Flash (more on this in another post.) Microsoft office corrupted yet another of my wife’s personal files. Computer needed dusting out anyway.

Enter the obligatory hard drive wipe and operating system reinstall.

With the exception of not being able to get USB 2.0 working on my aging motherboard the initial install went well. Driver updates for my graphic card and web cam installed without a hitch. A good thing because the drivers I was using were 3 years old. I’m not entirely sure USB 2.0 is not working, it could be the card reader that’s fubar. Doesn’t matter now anyway. I gave up on the card reader when I realized the refurbished wireless printer we picked up for $50 has one on it.

So neener that now defunct and disconnected card reader still sitting uselessly in the tower!

I made a conscious effort to K.I.S.S. and only install the programs I know I’ll be using. I had a twenty minute discussion with my wife about how Microsoft Office will never get it’s grubby little, resource hogging, file corrupting hands on our system(s) ever again and she will just have to leave her “safe place” and deal with using the far more superior OpenOffice for all her administrative needs. I braced for a fight but surprisingly she didn’t put up much of one this time. Phew!

Being a gamer, back in the days of Windows 95 it wasn’t unusual for people like me to wipe their 5 GB hard drive and reinstall every 3-6 months. Installing an OS is second nature at this point in life. My computer is running XP and to be honest, because I no longer game on the PC it’s more than adequate to perform the tasks I need. The problem I’m seeing these days is as Windows XP ages the programs get newer and incompatibility issues arise. This is where the install floundered into the fiery gates of hell.

When I started this project I did it under the precedent that’s simply what you have to with older Windows operating systems after a year or two of use. You install programs, you uninstall programs and after a while the registry gets more bloated, slow and fat than Rush Limbaugh at an all you can eat doughnut shop on free prescription drugs Tuesday.

As my install came to fruition I soon discovered that the reason my PC had slowed to a crawl had more to do with Firefox than a gradually corrupting XP operating system and introduced a whole new set of problems for me… I’ll blog about the specifics in a few days.

So, that’s what I’ve been up to. Fun, eh?

Did you guys miss me?

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