Back online…..

….Long story short: whilst visiting a dodgy website on Tuesday, picked up a shedload of viruses and Trojans, which proceeded to royally mess up my settings – my internet connection went down, everything slowed to a crawl, my AV program froze etc etc. After spending a whole day trying and failing to clean out all the buggers, I decided I’d have to do what I’d been putting off for months – format the hard drive and install XP. I’d been waiting until I could afford to buy a bigger drive – this one’s only a measly 40gb – but as we are currently in our usual state of flatf*****gbrokedness, I had to make do with it.
While I was tidying up the office in preparation – I had to hunt down all the installation and driver disks as well as write out a plan of action for backing up files – I found an old 30gb drive that was in perfectly good nick. So that got wired in as temporary back-up storage.
So, eventually, yesterday I got to the magic moment of hitting “FORMAT C: (y/n?)” That still gives me a little bit of a thrill, I have to admit. The power! And then onto installation.
What a pain in the backside! XP installation takes as much time as the old W98 installation did (I did enough of those to know). And then there’s the installation of all my old programs. That’s still ongoing, and I’m hitting problems. The device driver list says that the motherboard USB controller driver is missing, even though I installed the full set. So that means downloading an updated set from the manufacturer’s website. I still can’t get the sound to work – that probably needs an updated driver as well.
As for XP itself – not terribly pleased with it. Earlier this year, C gave me a WinXP disc, which I used. Turns out it was a pirate copy, with no updates, that she’d bought on eBay. So I can’t install any updates. Yet. (I shall go hunting on the web for advice later…)
Don’t much like the look of it, either. I didn’t feel happy until I’d installed my usual desk wallpaper and my Life On Mars retro screensaver asap, then set about customising things so that the Start menu and the Task bar were much the same as I am used to. Still can’t get rid of that stupid logon screen when I switch on the computer though; I don’t want it, I don’t need it, so how do I get rid of it????? And where’s the “Minimise all windows” button????
Grrrrr…. Back to installing stuff…..