S
stand_58
Instead of continuing an old thread, I'll pick up here from a thread I
started on 29 January.
Summarizing. I have an old XP pro based machine that is at death's door.
It works, but there is something wrong with the motherboard/power system
that keeps it from running at more than about 40% of its rated clock speed.
Anything more, it doesn't even get to the bios splash screen. So I bought a
new Media Center edition machine, shrank the 190 gig partition that
comprised the C: drive to 30 gig, added some extended partitions, and --
don't beat me about the head and shoulders here -- copied what was on the
old XP pro drive over to the same named drive on the new machine (happens to
be the H: drive). I edited the boot.ini file to make it into a dual boot
system, and then the fun started.
By judicious export of registry pieces from the media center build on my C:
drive, other registry pieces from the old H: drive, several repair installs
of XPSP2, and extensive use of the Media Center build to save successfully
changed registry hives in a backup folder, I am down to one unrecognized
device in device manager and the sounds all work. There are still some
problems, though, and I'm still out here looking for advice.
For one thing, among the minor problems, when I click on the taskbar and
then on toolbars, I get a completely greyed out sheet. When I right click
on the desktop and select properties, instead of 5 tabs, I get 4. Desktop
is missing, and consequently my wallpaper is unchangeably dull. Both of
those seem minor compared to the network status. The card is installed
properly according to the network card's property sheets, the settings are
identical to those on a machine that works perfectly, currently 4 feet away
from the new machine, I can ping myself (but can't ping anything else on the
network), but my XP pro copied over build is not apparently sending out a
DHCP address to the router (it does know that there's a live network cable
attached, though). I know the router works right and the cabling is OK,
since when I boot into the C drive which has media center edition on it, the
network works fine. The XP pro build assigns itself its own internal IP
address, the infamous 169.254.xx.xx when I tell it to get an IP address.
99%, perhaps more, of the troubleshooting advice on the internet that deals
with that 169.254 addressing scheme comes to the conclusion that something
is wrong with the router.
I will likely eventually have to reinstall some of the software that is on
the machine, registry diddling and repair installs won't fix everything no
matter how perfectly done. But that's OK. What isn't OK right now is that
it's so tedious downloading stuff to one machine and then usb driving it
over to the other so it can run there. That is not a long term solution,
I'd like to know how to get the network running, get some wallpaper glued
up, move some toolbars, and do the things that we all do with our machines.
Thanks for your past help, and I hope there are more insights you'll be
willing to make available.
started on 29 January.
Summarizing. I have an old XP pro based machine that is at death's door.
It works, but there is something wrong with the motherboard/power system
that keeps it from running at more than about 40% of its rated clock speed.
Anything more, it doesn't even get to the bios splash screen. So I bought a
new Media Center edition machine, shrank the 190 gig partition that
comprised the C: drive to 30 gig, added some extended partitions, and --
don't beat me about the head and shoulders here -- copied what was on the
old XP pro drive over to the same named drive on the new machine (happens to
be the H: drive). I edited the boot.ini file to make it into a dual boot
system, and then the fun started.
By judicious export of registry pieces from the media center build on my C:
drive, other registry pieces from the old H: drive, several repair installs
of XPSP2, and extensive use of the Media Center build to save successfully
changed registry hives in a backup folder, I am down to one unrecognized
device in device manager and the sounds all work. There are still some
problems, though, and I'm still out here looking for advice.
For one thing, among the minor problems, when I click on the taskbar and
then on toolbars, I get a completely greyed out sheet. When I right click
on the desktop and select properties, instead of 5 tabs, I get 4. Desktop
is missing, and consequently my wallpaper is unchangeably dull. Both of
those seem minor compared to the network status. The card is installed
properly according to the network card's property sheets, the settings are
identical to those on a machine that works perfectly, currently 4 feet away
from the new machine, I can ping myself (but can't ping anything else on the
network), but my XP pro copied over build is not apparently sending out a
DHCP address to the router (it does know that there's a live network cable
attached, though). I know the router works right and the cabling is OK,
since when I boot into the C drive which has media center edition on it, the
network works fine. The XP pro build assigns itself its own internal IP
address, the infamous 169.254.xx.xx when I tell it to get an IP address.
99%, perhaps more, of the troubleshooting advice on the internet that deals
with that 169.254 addressing scheme comes to the conclusion that something
is wrong with the router.
I will likely eventually have to reinstall some of the software that is on
the machine, registry diddling and repair installs won't fix everything no
matter how perfectly done. But that's OK. What isn't OK right now is that
it's so tedious downloading stuff to one machine and then usb driving it
over to the other so it can run there. That is not a long term solution,
I'd like to know how to get the network running, get some wallpaper glued
up, move some toolbars, and do the things that we all do with our machines.
Thanks for your past help, and I hope there are more insights you'll be
willing to make available.