Tips for everyday life

Mainland Chit-Chat
#1

When you’re installing windows XP on a laptop with no bootable CD drive, the easiest way to not waste 6+ hours doing stupid crap that won’t work is as follows:

1)get a dos boot disk with USB CD-ROM drive support
2)use fdisk to make a partition for your OS and a 2 GB one for Windows install files
3)format the 2GB partiton in fat or fat32
4)copy the windows install files from the CD to the smaller partiton (D: in my case)
5)run winnt.exe from within the i386 folder on D:
6)install windows onto the unformatted partition you made earlier (should be C:)

Next week I’ll have some useful tips on how to keep your new centerpiece fresher for longer. No dinner party is complete without one.

#2

That is good advice!

#3

Turns out that advice doesn’t work if your computer is haunted and/or a physical manifestation of pure evil. Windows XP didn’t want to install on my laptop through DOS, so I had to install windows 2000 on a second partition and then install XP on the first partition from within 2000. I was very close to a holy water bath, though I’m not sure that it’d help me install windows.

#4

I thought XP didn’t have DOS?

Anyway a holy water bath couldn’t have hurt!

Laptop problems suck though, earlier this year my one kept shutting down before I could choose a mode to load, but l got an auto installing xp disk from someone at something awful which worked so I just had to leave it and an hour later it had installed xp, firefox, adaware, winamp, div x codecs, the latest windows updates and stuff like that as well as the hardware!

XP is so much better than 95 when it works. :slight_smile:

I am so lazy with my computer now that I probally wouldn’t have been able to work it out like you!

#5

Are computers without bootable CD drives even… uh, useable? How old is that thing?

#6

I thought the same thing but figured if it runs XP it can’t be that old.

#7

It’s one of those tiny thin and light laptops that don’t have built-in optical drives. I don’t have the external CD cable, so I’m just using a USB DVD drive. Unfortunately, the BIOS doesn’t have an option to boot to USB device. It’s a 4 year old laptop, so it’s still plenty useable for anything but games.

#8

You can play some olde games like civ 2 and heros of might and magic 3 and stuff.

#9

All you need is starcraft, am i right?

#10

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