Upgrading
to Windows XP:
Easy As One, Two, Three…Hundred!
By Steven Salemi
Check Out: The Computer Guru
Archives
Citizen Bill holds his new Baby...
it's a Wacky Windows World!
"Yes. Of course. It was always like this. All horrors have followed the same course, getting worse and worse and forcing you into a kind of bottle-neck till, at the very moment when you thought you must be crushed, behold! you were out of the narrows and all was suddenly well."
-- C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters
...you had BETTER!!!!
(Authentic Windows XP Pro Setup Screen Shot)
2. Put aside a few days of your valuable time and a significant portion of your hard-earned cash in order to resolve the large number and bewildering variety of problems that have cropped up due to your decision to perform Step 1 (above).
3. Observe that you can no longer connect to the Internet. What happened? After a quick call to Earthlink DSL Tech Support, you are told that the “Winpoet” utility that connects you to Earthlink is not compatible with Windows XP. Lack of XP compatibility is going to be an increasingly familiar theme to you as the hours and days roll by...
4. Happily, Windows XP has its own built-in dial-up utility that should work with Earthlink DSL. You try it; it works. Thank God. You’re going to need the Internet quite a bit for what lies ahead. Remove all traces of "Winpoet" from your system and proceed.
4A. Now that you've got the Internet working again, why not check the Windows XP Update site to see whether there are any updates to XP? Of course there won't be; after all, you bought your copy of XP on Day One, it's as fresh and new as a newborn baby, right?
4B. Sure enough, there are a bunch of updates, even critical updates, available to XP on the Internet. Download 'em and proceed.
5. Remove Norton AntiVirus 2001 from your system, which is not Windows XP-compatible, and install Norton AntiVirus 2002, which is. Norton AntiVirus 2002 has a slick new interface and seems to work well.
6. Before proceeding, update the program using Symantec’s LiveUpdate and scan for viruses just to make sure there are none on your system. There shouldn’t be; you’ve always been meticulous about virus protection.
7. Discover two new virus-infected files that have not been detected previously by Norton AntiVirus 2001, even after regular full system scans using the very latest virus definitions and available program updates.
8. Shrugging your shoulders, disinfect the two virus-infected
files (struck by the
9. Remove Symantec PCAnywhere 9.2 from your system, which is not Windows XP-compatible, in preparation for installing a newer version, which is.
10. Removing Symantec PCAnywhere 9.2 makes Windows XP generate a “blue screen of death” crash every time it shuts down. It’s exactly the kind of crash you’d been told would disappear forever as soon as you upgraded to Windows XP. Is this related to the fact that XP offers new “Remote Assistance" and "Remote Desktop” features that are supposed to make PCAnywhere obsolete…?
10A. Maybe. But won't XP's Remote
Assistance and Remote Desktop features require
you to install XP on your laptop system as well as on your desktop system, i.e., on both ends?
Sure they will. And doesn't this mean you'll have to go through all these XP
upgrade headaches on your laptop, also? Sure it does! And
doesn't this mean that all the money you've poured into PCAnywhere over the
years will be wasted, ultimately? You bet!
11. While mulling all this over, use the XP System Restore feature to return the system to its last known good configuration. This handily eliminates the blue screen crash, but puts Symantec PCAnywhere 9.2 back onto your system – even though Symantec says that PCAnywhere 9.2 is not compatible with XP. What to do?
12. A new, XP-compatible version of PCAnywhere, Version 10.5, will be available sometime in November 2001. With the new XP Remote Desktop and Remote Assistance features, you don’t know if you’ll need it...but you may have to buy it anyway, just to keep your system running! Meantime, leave PC Anywhere 9.2 on your system, but vow not to use it. XP-generated warning messages appear every time you try, predicting dire results if you do.
12A. Wait a minute! Symantec is offering a free Beta Version of PCAnywhere 10.5 on the website. Normally you wouldn't touch Beta Software with a ten-foot pole, but hey, XP seems kind of like Beta Software, doesn't it? So download and install the PC Anywhere 10.5 Beta, which is the best you can do for now. The beta will time out in a few weeks, which should be enough time to decide whether to stick with PCAnywhere, or use Windows XP's new remote communications features...
13. Now tend to your malfunctioning Visioneer 8800 One Touch scanner by removing the drivers and reinstalling updated versions from the Internet. Visioneer warns that the new drivers aren’t XP compatible either, but they seem to work well enough. After two or three removals and reinstalls, anyhow. With the scanner working reasonably well now, move onto other issues.
14. Your CD Burning Software, Roxio’s Easy CD Creator 5 Platinum (the newest version now shipping), is not XP compatible, so you visit the manufacturer’s website to investigate upgrades. Good news! A software patch can upgrade the software to make it work with XP. Bad news! The patch isn’t available yet. Hang in there, baby.
15. Moving on to Symantec’s WinFax Pro software, you discover that the version you’re using, Version 10.0, is not XP-compatible. You need Version 10.02. Fork over $50 for this second-decimal point version upgrade, and install it. At that rate, upgrading to 11.0 is going to cost you $ 4,900.00.
16. WinFax Pro 10.02 seems to work fine, but hey, what happened to your fax messages and phone book? Aw heck, deal with it later. There are other, more pressing issues.
17. Per Microsoft’s suggestion, convert your hard disk file system from FAT32 to NFTS. This takes about an hour. A sense of real danger is in the air, as you watch file after file whiz by on the screen. Your life’s work, in the hands of XP! Talk about living dangerously…
18. But happily, the conversion works. Except why has the system slowed to a crawl? You’ve seen 486-based Windows 95 systems run faster than this!
19. After a few grueling hours investigating motherboard
chipset and hard drive controller issues, you discover that a bunch of software
drivers and utilities provided by Intel Corporation, and available from that
company’s web site, are needed to achieve peak perfo
20. Specifically, you need to run the latest Intel Chipset INF Installation Utility (after removing the previous version, if any). Next, you need to install the latest Intel ATA Bus Master Storage Controller drivers (after removing the previous version, if any). And finally, you need to install Intel’s new “Application Accelerator” utility. All this, in order to get everything running correctly.
21. The goal here is to remove all Microsoft-supplied,
XP-certified chipset and hard disk controller drivers -- the ones installed by
default when you perform the XP upgrade – and replace them with Intel drivers.
What's a chipset driver? You'd better find out!!!
22. The Intel software driver installation is tricky. Where exactly do those utilities dump the necessary driver files, and why don’t they install them automatically for you, instead of hiding them on your hard drive and making you install them yourself, manually, file by file?
23. The system speed is back to no
24. Outlook 2002 (XP), no
25. Figuring that Outlook XP is bound to work well with Windows XP (and observing no difficulties with other Outlook-equipped systems), you look for troublesome add-ins to Outlook; third-party programs that have modified Outlook somehow, destabilizing it in the context of this new software environment.
26. You find two
likely suspects:
Pocket Mirror 2.0, which enables you to synchronize Outlook info
27. You find a slew of tech notes and warnings from Microsoft about the WinFax phonebook link mucking up Outlook, but these refer to earlier versions of WinFax, not (necessarily!) the new, XP-compatible 10.2. So you give Symantec the benefit of the doubt and figure it has to be Pocket Mirror. Maybe there’s a new, updated version on the net somewhere, but how can you worry about a Palm Pilot when your entire office system is down?
28. Just to be safe, you remove Pocket Mirror 2.0 for now and leave off worrying about Palm Pilot/Outlook synchronization for another day. Then you run the Outlook XP detect and repair function again. Is Outlook fixed now? Maybe…maybe. Or maybe Pocket Mirror wasn’t the culprit after all. Maybe it was WinFax, despite the fact that you’ve installed 10.02 and it’s supposed to be XP-compatible…
29. Maybe you’ll have to follow the Microsoft workaround for disabling the WinFax phonebook link to Outlook. This will make using WinFax less convenient, at least, until you reenter every Outlook contact into the WinFax phonebook by hand. No problem, the phonebook’s gone anyhow. Or maybe you’ll have to uninstall Outlook completely and reinstall it, and maybe that will fix it.
30. Outlook’s hanging in there, but the Earthlink/DSL/Internet is not working again. Try powering down and recycling the DSL modem and restarting the system. No good…another call to Earthlink…problems at their end, not (incredibly) XP-related.
31. Two days and $ 510 later (not including time or labor or energy or pain, just cash), the system is up and running pretty well, although it feels like a house of cards. Is the system really as fragile as it feels, or is it just residual paranoia from the events of the last two days?
32. You run the system restore and create a restore point; this is as good as XP has been yet. You can’t wait for the extra memory to arrive. A good luck charm. An insurance policy.
32A. Break out the checkbook again and purchase some additional XP-compatible programs/upgrades. ScanSoft Corporation's PaperPort Deluxe 8.0: $100 (nice program, but this upgrade is priced about 50% too high). Quicken Deluxe 2002: $80. Dataviz Conversions Plus: $40. Still haven't gotten around to Pocket Mirror ($40). When will it end?
32B. My God, better back all this up! Iomega Peerless 20GB Drive, $450. PowerQuest Corporation's Drive Image 5.0: $70. New Seagate 80GB Hard Drive, $150 (wholesale price). Are these prices with or without the rebates? Damned if I can remember...damned if I can't...
33. In fairness to Microsoft,
and the rest of the industry, you remember this was an
upgrade from an existing ME system (which itself was once a Windows 98 system),
and that, through prodigious efforts, you’ve avoided having to refo
34. You note happily that buyers of new systems with XP pre-installed ( Custom Built Systems by The Computer Guru always preferred) will sidestep the lion’s share of this grief -- PROVIDED! -- provided they are very careful indeed about what software programs and hardware gadgets they intend to connect to their systems.
35. You realize XP users would have to be certifiably insane to contemplate the installation of a single piece of hardware or software unless it is absolutely, positively XP-compatible…to the best of everyone’s knowledge.
36. Even then, you’d caution them to make liberal use of the Windows System Restore feature, one of the best features (you remember fondly) from Windows ME.
37. And then you awaken, as if from a dream, and ask yourself:
Why did I upgrade from Windows ME again?
38. Postscript: WINDOWS XP -- WHEN INSTALLED AND SETUP CORRECTLY (no easy feat, as this article demonstrates) -- ROCKS!!! It feels solid and indestructible, like some huge, expensive Mercedes-Benz gliding down the road at a buck twenty (768MB of RAM doesn't hurt). The interface is great. The boys (and girls) in Redmond have done it again.
39. Postscript 2: This article can
easily be read as Microsoft-Bashing. But is it really that simple?
How come all those software and hardware vendors (are you listening, Symantec?)
didn't have patches and upgrades ready for XP on launch day? And how come
some vendors' stuff (like Adobe's) never needs patching or upgrading when
a new MS O/S comes along, and other vendor's stuff (like Symantec's) always
does? I mean, XP's arrival wasn't exactly a surprise to anyone in the
computer industry...!
THE END