XP Pro woe

[non-geeks look away now]

I’ve had nothing but hassles since I upgraded to XP Pro late last year. So last week I decided to bite the bullet and reformat my main hard drive and try a clean installation.

Easier said than done.

Suffice to say that despite having checked that my Dell PC can boot from a CD and that the XP Pro CD was, indeed, bootable I ended up having to create a set of XP Pro Boot disks (floppy disks no less – remember them!).

I finally managed the reformatting of my main drive and the re-installation of XP Pro last night. Tonight (or the weekend) I’ll re-install all the old applications (well not all of them, I won’t bother with the ones I tried, didn’t like and never removed).

Anyway, all this ties in nicely with this news story about Dell. What ARE they thinking? And what’s the bets it’s been removed by Monday morning!

Ohh and if any of you clever techy people know why my Dell desktop blue-screens when the screensaver kicks in, please let me know.. I think it’s something to do with the power save mode but can’t figure it out (and yes, at the moment I have no screensaver configured – I’m not THAT daft…).

So that’s my ‘fun’ weekend outlined – what about yours?