My HP laptop is about two years old and has seen heavy, heavy use. This use level is quite prominent in the glacial boot-time for XP. Sure, I get the GUI and Start button in just a few seconds but it takes several minutes to figure out the rest of what it wants to do before I can click on the Start button. Being an old Windows-hat, I know this means it's time to wipe the hard drive and reinstall.
I first attempted the process using a TinyXP CD. This got about 99% of the way through and then started crapping out while reading some files from the CD. Rebooting only gave me more heck - the TinyXP install wasn't even recognizing the hard drive.
Next, I tried a hot-off-the-burner WinXP Pro iso I downloaded. Similar results - wankiness on reading certain critical files form the disk.
I'm burning these disks on my HP desktop that's less than 10 months old. These disks are getting errors on the 2-year old DVD-RW in the laptop. Annoying as shit... I have a colleague who I gave a copy of MRVIN to recently and he got errors on the disk - which was burnt using the laptop.
So I'm trying to circumvent the problem - I'm building a WinXP installation on a bootable USB stick. The setup uses BartPE and the basic instructions are included with the download. The weirdness involves snagging the ramdisk drivers from the Windows Server 2003 SP1 download - 350MB to get about 300K of drivers.
My wife's Toshiba laptop is about a year older than the HP. I've noted before how much better the components in the Toshiba are than the HP. And the Toshiba is literally "the cheapest laptop at Office Depot" on the day I bought it. The HP, in contrast, was a mid- to high- range custom build dv6000.
We'll see what happens...
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