Kelly got game

I performed a near miracle today. The big boss walks in to my office and says he wants a faster computer with Windows XP on it. I suggest Vista because the new machines really like Vista. They would like Windows 7 if we had the appropriate licenses, but no dice. We are still putting an eight year old OS on some of our systems. Hey, it is his company. When he says jump, you jump.

OK, we need XP because of some specific software we need to run.

Dell doesn't sell any new computers with XP on them that are more than netbooks. No support any more. Microsoft has basically discontinued the OS. No one makes drivers for it any more.

I pop in the CD, boot and get a blue screen of death in a bout a minute. Don't even make it to the "Press enter to install Windows" bit.

In proper IT fashion, I weep for a moment. Then hit Google. Half an hour of shearing finds a single entry on a forum on Microsoft's page somewhere mentioning my problem. They mention switching to legacy ATA settings in the BIOS.

The first try did nothing. I look around for another version of XP. Yes, there are many versions. I found one and tried again.

It worked! ... for a while. I got all kinds of copy errors. DRAT!!!

It turned out to be the drive, not the media. Good thing that. I didn't have any other copies of that particular version of XP. Sixth or seventh try is a charm. The OS installed.

Now comes the fun part of finding drivers. Dell is normally extremely helpful for finding drivers. Just so long as you are installing an OS they support. Fortunately, the video drivers just shut up and install. The Ethernet, that is another matter.

I have been down this road before. I boot of the Ubuntu live CD and run a program called 'lspci'. This gives me what Ubuntu thinks are the device names and descriptions. Considering this Ubuntu is about three months old and the XP I'm installing is more like seven years, it is a good bet. I Google the Ethernet drivers and find one that seems to work.

At this point the install is more or less done. Get it on the network and hand it to someone who needs it. Before I let it go, I make an image of the hard drive just for good measure.

We didn't put XP on these boxes before because there was no info on what to do to get them to work. That was just before the turn of the year. The forum entry that set me on my quest was from April I believe.