It only took an afternoon, and most of the evening, but I now am the proud owner of a dual boot desktop Pentium 4 computer!

I’ve mentioned my HP 864n a few times on the blog, and this past week I did some major hardware upgrades to it, in the process of bringing it back to life. Windows XP died last August, going into a horrible reboot loop, both in regular and safe mode. I used Knoppix Live linux CD to verify the drive was still good, but had no luck in trying several different methods to fix the boot issue.

Fortunately the next day after the system crashed, I won a nifty little door prize here at Central Wyoming College…a brand new Dell Inspiron 6000 laptop…and I’ve been using it since then.

I picked up a new 200 gig hard drive last week, with intentions of using it as an external USB 2.o storage drive, but then thought how I could use it for something else…while improving on things.

So…installed the 200 gig in the 864n, installed the full recover CD set of 9 cds (full recovery of WinXP MCE, as it came out of the box), and a few other tools. Also installed a new Sony DVD-+RW dual layer burner, and another half a gig of RAM at the same time.

System has been running VERY fast all week. A friend from DC surprised me with the original boxed set of SUSE Linux 10.0 this week, and knowing that it was in the mail, I toyed with the idea of DUAL BOOT!

Going from the included manual, it took only 5 hours (mostly software install time, plus downloads of 160 megs of updates automatically by the install procss). A few reboots, and it’s working…Suse linux 10.0 and WinXP MCE on the boot menu…

All hardware works…including the printer and tv card…network system is all hunky dory…and web access is as fast as I want it to be…1000kb download speeds from my wireless internet access via Wyoming.com.

I’ll keep you updated as I begin to play with Suse…and start looking at some linux multimedia tools to learn about.

How to reset your Windows XP Administration Password, when you forget it…

A fellow student here at Central Wyoming College came to my dorm last night with a major issue.

He had JUST received his brand new Dell 9300 laptop computer earlier in the day, and in just a few short hours, had set a password to log into the computer from bootup, and promptly forgotten it.

We tried all variations of his chosen password, to no avail. So, booted up my new Dell 6000, did a few searches, and found some hints on sites such as Experts Exchange.

Tried a few of them, including booting from a WinXP CD, and nuttin’…

Dug a little deeper on the web, and found the answer.

From a cold boot, go into SAFE MODE in WinXP. Do this normally by hitting F8 a few times during the first part of the boot process. Scroll up the selection bar until you have SAFE MODE highlighted on the choice menu, and hit ENTER.

After booting into Windows safe mode, hit START, SETTINGS, CONTROL PANEL, and USER ACCOUNTS. Select an account to CHANGE. A menu comes up that will give you the choice to CHANGE PASSWORD on that account. (By the way, you’ll have ADMIN rights while logged in this way.)

You can also choose to REMOVE PASSWORD from an account while in this section. Now, simply reboot.

Viola!

You have your computer back where you can USE IT again.

While you’re recovering from this near heart attack, take the time to DO A BACKUP, scan for VIRUSES, check for SPYWARE, and send your wife an email telling you how much you love her….

DO IT!

Rich

…on getting this system o’mine back to speed. It’s an HP 864N, and is about 6 months old, having purchased it new (actually, recertified) from TigerDirect.com in mid March.

I’ve been happy with the hardware, speed, and all the bells and whistles, but my oldest son managed to try to hide his ‘net tracks in mid May, and in so doing caused a full meltdown (complete reinstall of applications and operating system WITH reformat, as all that good stuff is on a separate partition on the big drive). Spent most of the summer trying to recover files with just about every file recovery tool known to man, and simply had so many things going on with THAT, that I didn’t get any real projects of mine done, save for one ( production of another CD Rom for my website). I’d hoped to get a lot more than that this summer.

Anyway, reinstalled the operating system last friday, after backing up the registry. Recovered in non-destruction mode (meaning NO reformat of the drive), and after a couple of days of CONSTANT rebooting, messing with some windows settings, reinstall of Office XP, Norton Internet Security with Live Update of EVERYTHING, reinstall of all spyware and firewall programs, and downloads of a few system fixing thing-a-ma-jiggers, as of today everything seems DONE.

Last thing I did this morning was start running Norton Utilities 2002 ( free with my purchase of N.I.S online last year) and run a full WinDoctor profile…it found about 1600 problems, about 1500 of which were bad .lnk files from my mirroring my laptop drive onto the big 160 gig main drive, as well as quite a few registry issues.

Everything I want to be running, accessable, and usuable is now there and ready…almost a week after starting to fix this darn thing…and NO LOST DATA this time.

Just wish that all those dang computer manufacturers out there STILL sent out a REAL operating system CD with every computer purchase. This would make is so much easier to fix OS problems when they occur, instead of having to run recovery software and risk loosing registration info, links, data, setups, configs, and who knows what else…

Now, my next guess for the NEXT needed full reinstall of windows xp pro media center edition on THIS computer? April 15, 2005…roughly.

Well, my 6 month old HP desktop computer has been having some problems lately, first with Windows XP media center disappearing, and then gradually not running programs *I* wanted it to, such as GetDataBack XP ( to recover a crashed 10 gig usb 2.0 pocket drive that got lunched a couple weeks ago in the student lab ), Norton Utilities WinDoctor ( to fix multitudes of problems ), and a few other things.

Having done this once already this past summer on this system, I knew I could recover apps and OS from the system recovery tool, without deleting my data or formatting the drive.

I did it the smart way, I thought….backed up the Registry by exporting it, before getting started. Also backed up about 15 gigs of files to the exteranl 80 gig drive. Ran recovery, and no major problem EXCEPT 6 hours of waiting for it to “Finish, click to return to windows”, where it must have been doing SOMETHING. I left and went to work without it finishing, but when I got off and came home, it had finished.

So, made sure the data was there and checked several shortcuts ( MS Office, Norton Internet Security, etc) and got the normal errors I’ve seen several times, stating pretty much that registry data does not exist (which is the reason I exported and saved the registry before starting.

I clicked over to My Docs, where I’d saved the exported registry, and reimported it. At this point, I haven’t reinstalled anything…yet.

Office is now there but ‘needs to install?’ Norton Antivirus is a no go. Spy sweeper is still dead….and GetDataBack STILL won’t install….but Windows Xp Pro Media Center Edition is working fine again….now I can hook up the newly available cable tv cable and watch tv and record to the drive or dvd burner.

I suppose I’ll have to go thru about 300 programs one by one and reinstall a large portion of them again…just to make sure they work.

It still pisses me off that Windoze, even at this late date in microsoft history, is STILL so buggy, NOT dependable to stay running, and so ridden with security problems that you HAVE to run more than a half dozen virus, spyware, and firewall programs JUST to stay safe while on the web….

Ric