Complete Hadrware restore

  • Thread starter Thread starter Bill Rothe
  • Start date Start date
B

Bill Rothe

Help!

I suffer from that dreaded mental condition: "If it works, tweak it to try
to make it work better" Which invariably ends up making it not work at all.

Is there a way to completely restore all hardware to a "new install"
condition without actually doing a new install with all the associated
windows updates and reinstalling all apps?

I recently had a CD-RW problem and tried the normal fix of deleting
it in device manager, shutdown, unplugging the CD-RW, restart, shutdown,
re-plug in the CD-RW, and let WinXP re-detect the drive. This did not fix
the problem as there were some traces of my previous tweaks that were also
detected when XP re-detected the drive. I also did a repair install of XP
with the same results. The only way I fixed it was to do a complete clean
install of XP.

What I'm looking for are the files/directories that can be deleted from the
HD and restored from the XP setup CD, as well as the registry Keys that need
to be deleted/reset that will cause XP to re-detect the hardware and install
the factory default drivers and settings. I realize that this can be
dangerous, but I am already adept at doing clean installs anyway :-).

TIA Bill Rothe
(remove "nospam"
 
Thanks Yves, but I already tried without success. My Problem may have been
application software related as well as a hardware driver/configuration
problems. All I know is that I tried for days to fix with no luck except
for the Clean Install.

BTW, a repair re-install requires downloading all windows updates which
takes a while with my dialup connection. I am trying to find a way to reset
the hardware configuration without reinstalling the updates. It does save on
re-installing the apps though.

Bill
 
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