I took the plunge

Can you say Windows XP Professional? Ok, how about Office XP Professional? I took the plunge and upgraded my Gateway PIII 866 mhz from Windows 2000 Professional to Windows XP professional. What the heck. It is Friday night and Katy is out doing her weekly cropping. Cropping, scrapping, scrap booking, whatever it is you call it. It leaves me at home with the kids, the animals and the computer network. It has been quite some time since I destroyed my computer and I figured with worse case scenario I had all weekend to rebuild the PC if I blew it up.

If you are like me you have heard nothing but horror stories about how pathetic XP device drivers are. Between that and the automatic registration process which requires a LIVE Internet connection. Before I got started this is what I did. I believe that it must have helped me just a little bit.

I uninstalled Norton System Utilities , Norton Pcanywhere and a Symantec utility driver of some sort. I also uinstalled about 15 software applications that I was not using anyway. The first sign of trouble that I had was when the computer rebooted for the first time duing the installation phase. I lost video for about 15 minutes while the rest of the installation took place. I got nervous but I figured as long as I could hear the hard drive grinding and see the cd rom lighting up I was NOT about to interrupt the process. I figured that I could call Gateway Tech support if necessary. Luckily for me after the last reboot video came back looking good.

I installed Office XP and upgraded MS Office 2000 Professional using disk 1. That upgraded everything and added Front Page. I then ran the 2nd Office XP cd to add the media content off that cd and it managed to hose up my MS Office XP install. Outlook 2002 went away. Back to CD 1 and the reinstall which recovered everything automagically. Go figure ??? The only thing that I did not like about the Office XP install is that Outlook 2002 or version 10. whatever made me re configure my message rules. I had approximately 65 rules so I wound up deleting most of them and consolidating my folders in my personal .pst file into the Outlook pst file instead.

I then ran the Windows Upate and downloaded all the critical updates as well as several of the non critical device drivers. NIC, Video and Logitech Video drivers were the winners. Every device driver I downloaded and installed worked and gave me increased performance. Thus far this experience has been a huge sucess !! I must say that Microsoft (am I really going to say this...) did a BANG up job on how the interface looks.

Now I need to install Snorton Antivirus software and pray that I dont blow this otherwise good evening into plasma dust. Snorton Anti Virus software can be a weeee bit termpermental. More on that later.