Rebuilding a Windows XP Installation – Part 2

Installing XP properly the first time is going to take a while. There is no way to do it quickly, so don’t expect to have it done in an hour. Set aside a weekend afternoon, because you’ll need it.

Pop in the disc, format the whole hard drive and install XP from scratch. Most of the process is completely automated. There is very little manual involvement other than getting the drive formatted at the beginning and setting your time zone later on.

Which XP takes the longest to install?

The first one, meaning the release prior to Service Pack 1. If you’re installing XP from an old Dell disc in particular, chances are pretty good you probablt have a "pre-SP" disc.

Working with Windows Update – Part 1

You will have to go back to Windows Update many times to update many things and reboot many times.

Here’s a tip to make this go a little faster:

After the initial install of XP, click start/run, type wupdmgr and cilck OK, like this:

On every reboot, of which there will be many, run this over and over and over until Windows Update has absolutely no more updates to install.

Working with Windows Update – Part 2

When Windows reports that there are no more updates to get, it lies. There are more.

After all the system updates are done, now it’s time to get the extras. Launch the Windows Update Manager as outlined above, and purposely perform a Custom install. You’ll see the button for it:

The extras you should get:

• Windows Internet Explorer 8
• Windows Media Player 11
• Any download labeled as a .NET Framework (v1, v2, etc.)

The extras you should avoid:

There’s only one, Windows Search 4.0. What this does is install a small search thing in your taskbar. This in itself is not a bad thing, but it’s the background indexing process that will slow your XP to a crawl. DO NOT use Windows Search 4.0. Out of all the updates, this is truly the only one to stay away from.

Coming up – more Windows Update stuff – stay tuned!