Tissue's Technical Adventures Continue

[[JiF][AARP]Tissueman]

I've had our old PC in the garage waiting for a good opportunity to clean it up. I figured today was a good time. It came with Win98 that I upgraded to XP a few years ago. It only has a 10 GB hard drive that I was having trouble keeping enough free space for it to run decently.

First I had to download a Win98 start-up disk program. I found several and made about 4 different boot disks (later I discovered the one I got with the PC in the box of junk I keep for that PC). I installed the first one and got it to work and load 98 only to discover that it didn't reformat everything like I hoped. I still ended up with a PC that only had ~700 MB of free space. So I checked with Beej and he told me about DBAN. So I nuked the hard drive and inserted the boot disk. It said I needed to have some sort of partition. So I googled that and found out I had to run the fdisk command in DOS. After that, it asked for something else that I don't remember, but I was able to do that too.

Then I reloaded Win98 with no problems and put back the software that came with the PC. Finally I installed XP. Somewhere in the process it wanted a name for the user so I picked "Occupant". I got XP installed and it said "you have to activate within 30 days or else". So I tried to activate using the internet. Evidently this activation tool is pretty stupid. I was able to surf the internet with IE, but this tool could not find the internet. I finally had to call and talk to a very nice computered generated lady who activated XP for me. Now it is running okay. Currently it is downloading and installing 58 important updates. It will be tied up for about an hour. I was hoping to have it back in the garage before my wife gets home from work, but that probably won't happen.

It cleaned up the hard disk considerably. I now have over 5.5 gigs of free space. I know I had about 2 GB tied up with a game I could not uninstall for some reason. Anyway, if you want to waste an afternoon, I can give you some good advice on how to do it. I think it might have been a cleaner process if I had just filled our big plastic bucket with water and let the PC take a nice long swim.

[[JiF]Lt Gav]

And you did all this because?
Oh yes you're retired & the devil makes work for idle hands

[[JiF][AARP]Tissueman]

And you did all this because?
Oh yes you're retired & the devil makes work for idle hands

Spot on.

[[JiF][AARP]Tissueman]

Wow. After all the updates I only have 3.2 GB of free space. Time to shut 'er down and put her back in the garage.

[[JiF][AARP]Grimp]

I guess I should not tell you that you don't need to install 98 first Even if it's an upgrade
You just boot the upgrade CD and it will ask you to prove you had upgradable OS. You pop in your 98 install CD and when it sees it it happily installs XP from scratch with out upgrading. Much cleaner way to upgrade.

[[JiF][AARP]Jimbo]

Grimp has been known to pull the wings off flies also

[[JiF][AARP]Tissueman]

Now that you mentioned that my son told me the same thing a while ago, Grimp. I suppose I could do that tomorrow if I get bored.

[[JiF][AARP]Grimp]

Might be more fun to install a Linux game server on it. Just for the heck of it