Bare Bones
Troubleshooting Installation
I get a lot of letters from readers
that experience trouble installing Windows XP. By the time they get
around to writing me, the old operating system is long ago trashed
and they have tried everything under the proverbial computing sun.
Well, almost everything. It's a fact of life that when installing
operating systems, less is better, especially when there are
problems. If you're in the above category, give this a try.
Remove everything that is installed
or connected to your computer so the only things remaining in the
case are:
Motherboard,
processor, and cooling fan
Graphics card
One stick of RAM
One hard drive
One CD ROM drive |
That's it. No sound card, no network
interface card, no modem, no extra hard drives or CD ROM drives.
Especially important is not to have more than one memory stick, and
it should be a minimum of 128MB. Connect up the monitor, the
keyboard and the mouse and power up the machine. Go into the BIOS
settings and look for a setting for the basic BIOS default
configuration. Select it, then make sure that if you're booting from
a CD ROM that the CD drive is the first boot device.
Reboot and let the installation
process begin. I haven't kept track of numbers, but in the vast
majority of cases the installation was completed with no problem.
Once you have the basic operating system in place it's a simple
matter to start adding back in the extra memory, drives, and devices
that were stripped out initially.
A final tip. I know it's tempting to
add everything else back in at once after a successful install.
Don't do it. Something was causing a problem initially or you
wouldn't be using this procedure. Add the pieces back one memory
stick, one hard drive, one network interface card at a time and test
the system for proper operation after each addition.
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