How to XP and Window XP for Dummies

Article on How to XP,Window XP for Dummies;

Installing Windows XP for Dummies;
One day I'll learn that I should have nothing to do with any version of Windows. It always ends with me swearing at hardware.

As mentioned before, I've got a new Dell PC. Which frees up the old one to go off to university with my stepdaughter? Neither of my PCs has Windows installed, but the new PC came with a Windows XP for Dummies installation disk [1] so the plan was to install the new version of XP onto my old PC. This is where I learned How to XP.

Well, no.

I thought it would be as simple as putting the XP installation CD into the CD drive and rebooting. I thought that the PC would boot from the CD and automatically start the installation. I was wrong.

The PC found the CD and realized that it was bootable. It then tried to boot up. It got as far as saying that it was checking the hardware but then it hung. I tried this a few times. On one occasion I even left it for a few hours to see if it was just running very slowly. It had just hung.

So it seemed that this installation CD didn't like being booted on a PC that didn't already have Windows installed. So I thought that I'd install another, older, version of Windows first and then install XP over that. And what a large number of Windows installation media I found around the house. I tried Windows ME, Windows 98 and Windows 95. All of them failed to boot from the CD. I was beginning to think that the CD drive was faulty (even though I knew it worked fine under Linux).

And then I found the installation disk for the copy of Windows ME that originally came with that PC. That one worked. About half an hour later I had a copy of Windows ME installed on the PC. I was tempted to just stop there, but I know that Windows ME is one of the flakiest versions of Windows ever, so I had to proceed to stage two and install XP.

That only took two attempts. The first attempt got to the stage when it was going to start copying files over and then informed me that it couldn't find any of the files it needed to copy. It helpfully suggested that I put the correct installation media into the CD drive. It was, of course, already there. On rebooting, it booted from the CD and went straight into the installation routine. I still don't understand why it didn't do that before.

There was only one surprise left. During the system setup phase, it asked me to give the computer a name. Make it Window XP for Dummies if you like.