Specs of my notebook:
Acer Travel Mate 260 (bought in May 2002)
20 GB Harddrive
256 MB Ram
OS: Taiwanese Windows XP Home edition
What did I do today?
I ran a virus check (updated Norton Anti Virus) on the whole C-Drive - no viruses found
I installed an old version of Twin Bridge Chinese Partners
I downloaded and installed the most recent Windows XP Service Pack
Downloading wasn’t a problem, installing somehow took ages.
I tried to download and install some more updates, but the computer would get slower and slower.
I thought about defragmenting the hard drive, but the analysis said it wasn’t necessary. Then, I wanted to delete all temporary files (around 2 MB or something), but the computer wouldn’t do it.
Now, the screen looks very weird (weird colors, everything larger than usual, more dots, big black frame). I can turn it off by holding the button for turn on for a couple of seconds. I can start again, it will show the welcome screen, ask for password and then stop at the logging in screen.
It’s probably my fault, maybe the Twin Bridge installation? I installed the same version on WIN 2K professional yesterday, and it works alright.
Does anybody know what to do? And, thanks, but I can do without the Linux hints and the MS bashing. I’m not exactly a fan of Microsoft but that’s what I’m used to and I have too much different work to do to bother with Linux.
I have had problems with XP on two laptops. Why not put W2K on your laptop ? I can’t find anyone who builds or maintains computers who prefers XP over W2K. An ex-software engineer I know who now runs a computer business says that he hates selling machines with XP on them because he knows they will come back, but he cannot buy XP OEM version any more (MS policy) only the full retail and putting retail W2K on all his machines would make him uncompetitive. Any problems I have ever had with W2K have been minor and have been due to faulty hardware.
Insert your XP cd and it will take you through the motions of reinstalling. Just don’t format your drive or change the partition type or anything like that. Read carefully and you should be OK. All you data will still be there, as the reinstall just replaces your system files.
Obviously, if you don’t read Chinese get someone to read it for you otherwise you may go clean install and then its all gone.
Windows suck.
now that’s out of the way. It sounds like the update you did had a bad driver. I encountered a similar problem on my win2k machine. My problem is that win2k didn’t like my Asus video driver when the video card was made by Asus. It only takes the Nvidia drivers instead. You should try to boot up in safe mode. hit F8 during the boo up and choose to boot in safe mode. If the safe mode boot works, then the update installed a driver that the OS found to be incompatable. You should be able to use the roll back feature on your XP to the configuration before the update. You gotta love the Microsoft enhancements they built into every one of their products.
I think I love you Thanks, that was exactly the kind of info I needed. My notebook computer works again.
Btw, Hexuan: My notebook computer came with 1 system cd and two recovery cds. The system cd offers four options: HDD full rebuild (looses all your data), HDD non-destructive rebuild (keeps the data), anti-virus and MS-DOS prompt. I tried the HDD non-destructive rebuild option, but a message would come up: Your system can not find OS source files. I tried different things, but there was no way to get it started from the cd (and I can’t remember having gotten the kind of start-up diskette mentioned in the manual). I didn’t try the HDD full rebuild as my data obviously was still there (though I wouldn’t have lost anything, I had it all backed up). Anyway, it works now.
Oh, and, very convenient, all the material that came with the notebook computer had English as well: the manual, the NAV and the system cds. Much easier than working my way through Traditional characters
I think I need to grab somebody to check all the applications one day because the notebook seems to get slower all the time (and it doesn’t look that cluttered up to me). But at the moment, I mostly need it for data transfer, not too much for work.
XP has problems with the file fragmentation. Get Diskeeper Lite (free at: diskeeper.com ) and defrag your hard drive once a day…until you install Linux!
Thanks, that was exactly the kind of info I needed. My notebook computer works again.
