XP was a surprise

[rjwilldohisbest]

Greetings:

A few days ago I bought my Mother a computer for her birthday and it came preinstalled with XP home edition. I really like the interface and the features of this new OS, and at the same time I feel uncomfortable about the character of the OS. I would really like to learn more about it. I'm only familiar with win98 for about two years.

As One example of confusement being that I had unchecked a few things from the start up menu, this OS comes with a lot of features that my Mother will not use, and restarted the system, then noticed many unfamiliar services running that I never had encountered with win 98. I left these services alone. The computer does run at slower with these extra services I believe?

The computer is an HP pavillion bt963:
1.2 celeron type III
128 megs of ram
33.75 gig harddrive

I had noticed that the harddrive is capable up to 33 gig but only shows 24 gigs free? This can't be 2/3rds the OS and the added programs? If so this OS is huge. It would be nice to shrink or delete some unecessary files if at all possible.

Second example being I wasn't able to defrag my A: drive because of an invalid volume. I'm thinking this may be related to the file system but XP I believe is compatible with fat32 along with ntfs?

Conclusion:
I really like what this OS has to offer. maybe it's only me? I like basic myself. I kind of have the - if it isn't broke, don't fix it - type of attitude.

If anyone has any advice or higher learnings on this new OS it would be great.
Thank you all for your time.

RJ

 

[cschaffer]

" I kind of have the - if it isn't broke, don't fix it - type of attitude "
*******************************
It was broken.....they fixed it...wib98 was very unstable...

Just a comment

CS

 

[malepipe]

A few points to ponder
1)Have a look here for startup items on XP, not all will apply and some are not yet listed but its a good start.

http://www.pacs-portal.co.uk/startup_pages/startup_full.htm

2)The mis-reported harddrive size could be a BIOS error.Why a new system would have an outdated BIOS and why it got by QCI(quality control inspection)is a mystery but this can and does happen.Boot into the BIOS and check that the correct size is reported there.On start-up hit the "delete" key,you machine may be different so check the manual.If the size is incorrectly shown there, a BIOS update is required.This can be downloaded and installed from the directions there.
3)Most peoples "A" drive is the floppy drive not the harddrive.This could be your problem.If it isnt the floppy drive we are right back to the BIOS issue again.
4)Here is a good link to get you started learning Windows XP.Its pretty general but has some good info and links

http://www.zdnet.com/products/stories/reviews/0,4161,2809517,00.html

Good luck and have fun
Jimi_l(AKA malepipe)

 

[danmoss]

With regard to your Hard disk appearing a third full.

XP takes approx. 1.5Gb after a full install (including the Virtual Memory swap file). As this is a branded PC (i.e. made by HP) I imagine it came with a pre-installed software bundle, that will probably account for a large amount of the used space. Plus branded PCs these days have an annoying habit of not being supplied with CDs to restore to factory settings, instead they have a Hard drive partition which contains the information and a program that keeps prompting you to burn the backups to CDs. You probably won't be able to see this partition from XP itself.

Hope this helps a little.
Dan Moss

 

[Guest_imported]

Thank mp for this reference information.
This will be my first time going into bios but I feel confident. I found out last night that by typing in "services.msc" in the run box you can disable some current running services, I think this is different then startup but not sure.

One other interesting note was that the autoexec.bat file is empty? Does XP use a seperate batch file besides autoexec?
I installed an anti-virus program that does a pre-boot scan but it doesn't load at pre-boot or at start up so I'm thinking I might have to write in the path for the line entry in the bat file.

Thanks for responding

RJ

 

[electraboy]

You shouldn't forget that xp has in fact a complete different architecture than win95,win98 en winMe (the WIN9X series).
Windows Xp is having WinNt and Windows2000 as his ancestors, that's the big difference.
Windows XP is not fully supporting MS-DOS program (although they mentioned it) and more programs under WIN9X use MS-DOS than you'd suppose at first sight.

About your Harddrive:
Go to controlpanel - system management - computer management en choose disk-manager
(Or right-click this computer and choose "manage&quot
There you can see how many partitions your hard disk
contains and what's their capacity.

About the filesystem:
(I may be wrong about this but) Xp home edition only supports FAT, not NTFS
(which is a pity, because NTFS offers more security en reliability)

About freeing up space:
If you're a little bit experienced with a computer, why don't you wipe out your HD (assuming you have all the pre-installed soft on cd) and re-install the whole pc with only the software you need)
Most pre-assembled en pre-installed PC have the habit to run a lot of diagnostic progs and tools that are only slowing down your pc...µ

And if you know that installing XP is more something for you 4-year old kid to do... It is impossible to make anything foolproof because fools are so ingenious.

Murphy's Laws​

 

[rjwilldohisbest]

Hi again.

I checked out the disk manager and it does support btfs and fat32 and all drives appear to be labeled as Healthy.
Looks like two partitions (basic) one for C:\ and the other being on C:\ for recovery. The recovery supports fat32 while the main C: does ntfs.

The system restore size is 4.41 gig.
capacity of hd is 33.75gig(ntfs) / 24,94gig free 73% tolerance fault=0

I do not have a backup cd of the os unfortunately, everything was pre-installed so it looks like I have to be careful what I try to alter. I recently had to restore from the other day since I was missing add/remove options and about half of my other control panel icons. Things are fine now. This system is way different.

Hope this info helps?

 

[malepipe]

Although they will both support NTFS,your better off not to mix them.I suggest all FAT 32
jimi_l

 

[rjwilldohisbest]

Can I just take out xp and put in win98? the disks I have for win 98 are qrestores from compaq. I doubt the win site would give me answers or compaq for that matter so this would be a chancy situation, I'm thinking?

Right now I just got done with trying to copy files from one of my own cd's to my moms drive with no success. Went to install a udf reader and windows disabled it after the reboot. Plus the xp version of burning doesn't allow you to rewrite to other portions of a blank cd directly, mine does on win98 with the udf reader. cd type in xp is (cdfs)
if theres a conversion, maybe that would help?

C:\format sure sounds good at this point and time.
This is my Mothers computer and I would like to get it going up and running. If this was mine, then I would take the time to learn more about it.

Thanks for your time.

RJ

 

[electraboy]

That would be a good advice, i guess.
But, possibly, you'll have to repartition you hard disk.
You can do this by booting the win98 cd and then choosing the option Boot from Cd-rom. The computer will now start in ms-dos. There you can use de fdisk tool to do that.
A lot of your hardware will probably not be recognised, so if you don't want endless searches; you better check the brands of all the components as they are installed in the device-manager before you remove that xp.
It is impossible to make anything foolproof because fools are so ingenious.

Murphy's Laws​