Windows XP SP1 Nightmares

Santa Claus has delivered the toys under the Christmas tree and is on his way back to the North Pole. The kids have just opened all their presents from under the tree and I am glad it is over. LOL... They were about to drive mom and dad crazy as they bounced all over the house yesterday in anticipation. I guess I have forgotten what a big deal it is for kids on Christmas. HoHoHo Merry Christmas to one and all. Now, lets talk about MY Christmas gift that the Grinch left for me last night.

Remember I told you that I was going to wipe the hard drive on the family computer and start all over from scratch? I started the process at 1 pm and it should have ENDED around 6pm. From the time I used FDISK to kill the original partition to installing all of the software. Well thanks to the Grinch (who else can I blame ?) he stole my Christmas JOY by causing me to have to work on the blasted computer up until around midnight. How special.... LOL

Lets see, the last time I babbled about this I had formatted the drive with NTFS version 5 and was installing XP Professional Service Pack 1. I managed to get the OS installed with no problems and ran all of the MS Security Updates from the Windows Update website including Service Pack 2. I installed the Anti Virus software and then noticed that I did not have any sound. We cant have that so I dove in with both feet and elbows and remembered that I need to install the correct driver to make the speakers work. That is when the hardware nightmare began.

At this point I did not realize that my motherboard chip set and plug in cards were not going to work with XP SP1. After fighting with the sound card drivers for 2 + hours and multiple reboots and BSOD with the sysaudio.sys error I finally decided to blow the partition away and start all over again. That was around 7 pm that I decided that. I figured that would be the fastest way to fix the problem. When I tried to install XP with SP1 on a fresh partition I was greeted by multiple BSOD's AGAIN. At this point I gave up and took the sound card out and tried the install on a fresh partition which resulted in a BSOD so I tried to disable all sound on the MB which caused another BSOD. I finally went to the Internet and searched on the sysaudio.sys error with XP SP1 and was greeted with numerous nightmare stories of how XP SP1 just does not play well with some hardware. Well folks, guess what? Such is the case in my computer. I finally installed Microsoft ME on the computer with NO problems. I have Internet access, sound and the whole works. I also was able to install Microsoft XP Home and have it in a dual boot configuration. Everything BUT sound works on XP Home. Go figure... I think that it is time to buy a new home pc that will enable me to use XP Pro and Service pack 2.

I guess it was about 12:04 am when I looked at the laptop and noticed that I had lost wireless connectivity. Sigh... I thought, what the heck is wrong now folks? LOL... Sure enough I did not have Internet connectivity and then I found out that our entire phone service was down, no dial tone no nothing. I called Bellsouth and of course they determined that I REALLY did have a problem on the line and that it would be Monday before someone could come look at it. At this point I just turned everything off and went to bed. What else could I destroy anyway? This morning when we awakened the dial tone magically had come back on the phone. I guess the Grinch left the building and took all the gremlins with him. Thank God for that. LOL...

Now that the christmas gifts are opened and the children have calmed down some I can focus on reconfiguring our home PC with all of the software I need to install and I need to put together a bicycle together for Justin. I just hope I dont destroy that as well. LOL

So, anyway what is the moral of this story you ask? If it is NOT broken, dont fix it. LOL

Merry Christmas....