So I just loaded Windows XP onto my computer, it looks quiet snazzy and I am reasonably happy with how it looks now.
But the problems I’ve had the last few days… fierce annoying! :mad:
Back Story: About four months ago my sister, a computer teacher, gave me windows XP to load onto my computer, I put in the disk, let it do its thing and then I got this error message telling me that the following may not work if you install XP, they were basically the drivers for my printer, scanner, modem and my web cam. So being lazy and not wanting to reinstall all of them that night I cancelled the installation of XP and went about my merry way.
So my sister visited the house this week and says will we try the XP again on the pc, its much easier to use then windows 98. I’m like ok, your fairly computer competent lets do that then. So she proceeded to load XP, got the same error messages but she said she would sort it out. Ok that’s grand, so after several silly little problems we get windows XP onto the system, and as its installing itself after the restart of the PC I asked my sister “Hey where’s Rivendell?” Rivendell being my desktop picture. Oh, she said, you must have to get it again if it’s not showing up… ok weird never mind. So I had been telling her about these mini LOTR characters that I had, and had planned to show them to her, so I go to where the file should be, and that’s where the problems set in.
There are no files! Yep that’s right, everything I’ve saved onto the computer over the last four years seems to have erased itself. So whereas I’m not brilliant at computing, I know this isn’t normal, and my sister definitely knows this isn’t normal. So she rings a friend of hers who’s some sort of computer tech guy who does all the repairs at the school where she teaches and explains the problem to him. The guy is totally confused and doesn’t understand why the files haven’t come through. He recommends we uninstall XP, then back up all the files that should exist in the '98 OS, and then reinstall XP. Before we do that though I flicked through the program files in the start menu and noticed that some of the short cuts were wrong and all the MS programs (word, excel, access, publisher, outlook, and PowerPoint) are not working from the start menu. Wonderful…
Anyway so I uninstall XP, but lo and behold, there are no files in the My Documents of Windows 98 either. Great. So XP is loaded again, I kind of get over my losses and am just thankful that all the college stuff has been handed up.
So after all of that, I decide to go on the Internet. Simple enough task have never had any problems with trying to that before. So I log on, go to hotmail, and then I get this RPC error message and the computer shuts down, this happens a couple times and so I go to the sister mentioned previously, and she says hmm, sounds like a virus, and then she realises that she never installed the patch for that blaster virus that made its rounds a few months back. She reckons the virus may have being lying dormant on Windows 98 because it doesn’t effect it but then when XP was installed it executed itself. Anyway I spend the next two nights on the Windows Update pages, eventually installing the patch against this virus, and 45 other critical updates and two driver updates that my computer apparently needed.
By the way, how often do you check this page for updates for your PC?
Anyway so tonight I’ve noticed that Zone Alarm hasn’t been working, mention it to a sister and she recommends AVG, so I go download that virus protection, run a test and find fifty-seven infected files, some by a virus, some by a worm. And after all that, I’m still missing all my documents…
Anyway that was just some mindless info I thought Id share!