I need to upgrade my computer a little and the biggie is USB 2.0. I have some stupid questions, but it’s much less embarrassing to ask a bunch of strangers on the internet. I can’t see you rolling your eyes at my braindeadness. =^_^=
Anyway, I have a PC running XP. Am I correct in thinking that all I need to do is buy a card and install it? Or is there something tricky I need to be aware of? I’m going to be reinstalling XP when I get a new hard drive, but I’m not planning on any other upgrades.
Oh good, cuz I’m too cowardly to walk into the PC store. But I love Fry’s. I’m just not looking forward to reinstalling everything. (But I’m throughly backed up. I can be taught.)
You shouldn’t have to reinstall anything. If you’re not comfortable doing it yourself, any place that does PC repairs/upgrades/hardware installations can install the new drive in your PC and copy the contents of the old drive onto it.
Really? Cuz the drive is getting all sorts of errors. Maybe I’ll just borrow my dad’s exterior drive bay. Or just install it as a slave and then take it back out. (I built the computer in the first place, but it was several years ago and I had my dad supervising. But I’d rather build computers than do web design.) Duh. :smack: I was originally thinking I’d have to get a new motherboard, that’s what convinced me I had to reinstall. (Yeah, I’ve got confidence issues. I know enough to know I don’t know a lot and then I get scared.)
Is there anything I should do to clean it up? Run a registry cleaner or something? It’s not real slow, but I’m going to be installing some more resource-hoggy programs.
Your success will depend greatly on exactly what’s causing the errors. Obviously, if the software itself is corrupt, then copying it will result merely in a corrupt copy. On the other hand, if the problems are in the hardware, then you might be able to save most, if not all, of your data; again, depending on exactly what the problem is. You might try running a disk health scan, using ScanDisk or some other third-party product. These can identify bad or failing disk sectors and, if possible, move the data in them to a more stable area of the disk.
They’re in one of the XP service packs (1?). I run into this every time that I reinstall XP from the original CD. USB isn’t fully functional until I install the service packs.
Well, replace that original CD with a new XP install CD that you build yourself, which includes all the service packs that you use (and doesn’t include the crapware that comes with most PCs).