LOL, it was nasty <img src=icon_smile_wink.gif border=0 align=middle>…
That’s better, when even you can’t stand the smell of you, it’s bad…
Fender,
First, what makes you think your puter is so badly pooched you need to do a recovery?
I’m guessing you are using it now to get onto WT.
From plenty of experience with XP, it best to either fix the drivers directly, or re-build from scratch. I know Dice fixed his go slow with a system restore, but he was one of the lucky ones.
It’s almost impossible to backup a puter so you can restore your settings exactly as they were after a re-build. IMHO the best you can hope for is to keep all your data and just accept you will need to re-build the rest.
To be honest, you really should re-build a puter from the ground up once a year.
Before we start dicking about with your puter, we really need to do a backup, As Booms says, I really hope you’ve got a CD burner or a decent sized USB memory stick.
Even if you paid the money for HP to do a backup, the contract will come with so many disclaimers it’s not fit for a snot rag. No company will cover consequential loss from missing one of your critical files from a backup.
Our pet geeks swear by something called Secure Copy. Here’s a link to a web page that should allow you to download a trial copy.
http://www.pnltools.com/productinfo.asp?productid=48&refid=132
But you don’t need anything that flash. Drag and drop copies are fine.
Before doing any backups, clear out your Internet temporary files folder, empty the recycle bin etc. The more $hit you can get rid of, the quicker this will be.
To backup most of your stuff like web favorites, you just need to copy your entire profiles home folder.
Look in the c:\Documents and settings folder, you should see a folder with the same name as you use to log on to your PC.
Copy this to a CD or stick.
It’s a good idea to grab a copy of the All users folder as well, this can sometimes have some stuff in it as well.
A good tip to make sure you don’t miss any files from the backup is to use XP’s search function.
Search from the root of your C drive for all files *.* Then once it’s finished (this can take sometime) click twice on the modified date column header. This will reverse sort by date. You can then scroll down the list looking for files you want to keep. The logic being the stuff you work on the most will be closest to the top of the list.
And you know how it goes, the one file the IRS is on you’re a$$ for won’t have gone into My Documents and will be lost.
Take manual copies of you ISP properties setting and the IE Toos>Internet option>Connections dialogue. This will at least get you back onto the web which you can then get extra drivers from.
Can you identify what drivers / dll’s are bad?
If it’s for a device, try de-installing the device, and removing all trace of it from the Settings > Control Panel > System > Hardware dialogue
The next time you re-boot XP will auto detect it and re-install the drivers / dll’s.
If the above doesn’t work take Boom’s advice and format and re-build.
If you’ve got your original CD’s for video cards etc it’ll be easy.
But if you haven’t modified any of the internal from when you bought it, every driver you need should be on the HP provided CD’s.
If you have changed the internals and don’t have the driver CD’s, go onto the web now, whilst you still can and download all the drivers for your stuff and copy them to a CD or Stick.
Then go for it… And good luck…
BTW, all the above information is subject to all waivers under international law and you can’t lock my a$$ out of WT if it all goes bad…
You're born, you keep your head down and you die. If you're lucky...
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