Saturday, 27-October

Off to buy more RAM.... how cheap will a 256MB DIMM be?

Welcome to my journey through life after Windows XP! How did I get to where I am today? Well, its a long story...

Thursday, 25-October

11:00am - Drive past the local Staples store when I remember "It's XP day!"

11:02am - Enter Staples store to grab a copy of XP and Norton Anti-Virus 2002

11:03am - Forgot I left my wallet back at the office

01:00pm - Return to Staples... actually make the purchase!

01:30pm - Return to work... must finish the day before playing with XP!

07:00pm - I get home... flip on TechTV to find that they've cut "The Screen Savers" an hour short to air a pre-taped, and oft-aired special on XP. All I want to know is if this
thing will kill my hard drive!

07:10pm - I try to open the XP package. I figure that sliding my finger along the inside of the plastic guard's seam might pop loose the glue... instead, I cut my right pointer finger.

07:11pm - After bandaging the finger, I try again... this time with a pair of scissors. I manage to make a small intrusion on the package -- just big enough to rip open the plastic.

07:30pm - I've finished reading the manual... actually really useless -- no big surprise -- but the packaging is so pretty.

07:45pm - Okay, its go time baby! Let's say sianora to Windows ME!!!!

07:50pm - After booting up I read a couple of pages for instructions (namely Hewlett-Packard's own page which has simply WAY too many things they want me to do before I install XP.) I figure the guys at TechTV don't worry about this stuff as much, so I go to see what they say... "Back up all your data" -- ah, its a home computer anyway... even if I do toast it :)

08:00pm - Okay, I think I read somewhere to put the CD in the CD-Rom drive and boot right from it to make my install. But, it says it can't find ME... it wants disks... mine are outside packed away in the garage (I just moved)... F3... let's cancel!

08:05pm - So we're in to ME again. I thought I wouldn't have to look at this sorry excuse for an operating system ever again. Ugh. Okay, pop the CD in the drive, and access it MANUALLY through My Computer (Autoplay never worked!). So we're off and running -- it warns me that Easy CD Creator and the like won't work... I say "I know" - and we wait...

09:05pm - We're about T-Minus 5 minutes to everything being fully installed.

09:10pm - After having an hour to eat, and nurse the fresh cut on my finger, I come back to find everything hunky dorey. Time to activate! I don't get why the privacy freaks are so concerned over this... two clicks, and the amount of RAM, my Hard Drive size and CPU speed are flying down my broadband connection to a mega-computer somewhere in Seattle. (It's an Athlon 900, 45GB HD, and 128MB of RAM, BTW!)

09:15pm - Done! XP is up and running... but it doesn't automatically impose the "Teletubbies" desktop theme... gotta do this one manually.

09:20pm - Cool menus... It says I run my ATI TV Tuner program as one of my top 6. Oops... the drivers don't work. No problem... lets go find some.

09:30pm - Have the drivers uncompressed, and am installing the Video driver for the card... when............................................

09:31pm - Okay, my computer just rebooted. Its almost like it powered off and on. At least I get to see what the new ScanDisk looks like!

09:32pm - Problems... big problems... no sound card, my CD-R and DVD-ROM drives are missing. I'm up the creek without a paddle...

10:00pm - By now I've got everything figured out... I've deleted the uncompressed drivers from the hard drive, and have removed the CD-R and DVD-ROM completely from the Device Manager... let's hope it recognizes them this re-boot.

10:03pm - I'll try re-installing TV Tuner now... it reboots again on its own... only to say "Operating System Not Found". OH GREAT... Ctrl+Alt+Del... Same result. Time for a Cold Boot.

10:04pm - XP's ALIVE!

10:15pm - A couple of re-boots later (not to mention saying "no thanks" to the idea of re-installing the TV tuner drivers) we're back in business. Time to install some security... we start with Zone Alarm.

10:20pm - We reboot and start fresh with the process of telling Zone which programs it can let pass through. But some program named " " wants to have Server Rights??? I say no at first, but then I can't pull up any web pages. Uugh... it must be some sort of DNS process running by XP. Okay, fine, it can have access... but for CDN$139, would it kill Microsoft to name this little applet?

10:30pm - After going through programs for Zone Alarm, I re-boot and get set to install my recently-purchased Norton Anti-Virus. When the computer comes back alive, Zone completely forgets the programs I just taught it. UUGH!

10:45pm - Okay, I'll deal with Zone as I need to... Let's get Norton on so I can sit down to watch some TV before beddie byes.

10:50pm - Painless! Let's get the popcorn and enjoy the Screen Savers.

11:58pm - I'm back. Let's start putting XP to the test... what CAN it do? Well, I have Internet Explorer, Media Player, plus my Norton Anti-Virus is doing its full system test and everything is CRAWLING. Looks like I need more RAM. We'll tinker with that another day. In the meantime, time for bed.