The Hand Me Down PC - Computer Repair for Windows XP PCs and Reinstalling XP Home

I've been building and repairing computers for over 20 years, but I still get surprised once in a while. Last week, I was called in to repair a hard drive failure on an old Sony multimedia PC which originally ran Windows XP Home. The hard drive was a used one I had stuck in there a couple years ago, and it sounded a little funky then, so I wasn't shocked. The system has an external Maxtor One Touch hooked up through an add-in USB 2.0 card, so I wasn't worried about data loss. I just stuck a new 400 GB PATA hard drive in there and ran the Sony System Recovery CD set, as I've done for many a PC.

When the factory Windows XP Home reinstall completed, the system produced a "missing operating system" error, so I groaned and went through the process again. The second time through, I noticed that the LED for hard drive activity on the front panel was out, but I have good hearing so I stuck my head near the case to make sure the operating system was really installing. Then I got a shock. The factory installation CD's were installing XP all right, but they were installing it on the Maxtor One Touch!

So I unplugged the One Touch, and stuck the hard drive in another machine to pre-format it with NTFS, which went fine. When I put it back in the Sony and ran the factory recovery CD again, it went through fine and the system booted. So I tried to turn on Windows Updates to start bringing the system up to date and got another surprise. XP Home with Service Pack 1.0 can't run Windows Update, and Windows has discontinued Service Pack 1.1 which is the first step in the upgrade path. Then I remembered you can skip to XP Service Pack 2.0, which is really a full reinstall of XP over the existing version, but Microsoft no longer had the standard version available. The only option is Service Pack 2 for Network Installation from 2004, which ended up working fine.

After installing Service Pack 2, I was able to turn on Automatic Updates, which downloaded 74 updates and patches, after which I was able to download Service Pack 3, which was the final XP release. After downloading Service Pack 3, Automatic Updates found another seventy or so critical updates.

The next thing I did was install the software for the Belkin USB 2.0 add-in card, and reconnect the Maxtor One Touch. It worked fine except for one thing. When you choose to shut down the Sony, it closes XP and turns off the Maxtor! The system itself never powers down. So after restoring My Documents, I moved the Maxtor to an old USB 1.1 port where it no longer caused problems, aside from being slow. But to make room for the Maxtor, I had moved the wireless Logitech mouse to the USB 2.0 port, and it started freezing every time the system was restarted, you had to reboot to get it to work. So I moved the Logitech to a USB 1.1 port as well and moved the Inkjet printer to the USB 2.0 port, where it didn't cause any problems. Maybe its software is smarter.

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