Reinstall of an XP laptop

JohnB47

Hi all.

I'm thinking of reinstalling Windows XP on an old laptop I have.

I have a win 10 replacement laptop but it doesn't have a Firewire 400 port. The old laptop has one of these ports which I occasionally use with a Digital Audio Interface. This is the only reason to keep it and it's running very slowly now, hence the idea of reinstalling.

There will be no great loss if this all goes horribly wrong and I realise that I need to take all docs, images etc off before I start and make sure I have all the product keys for various programs (I'm pretty sure I've done that anyway, cos I'm using most of the programs on my win 10 laptop now too).

So, a bit of advice please. First, I have Product Recovery disk (Microsoft Professional) that I got with the laptop. Do I just use that and follow the simple the instructions that came with it?

What about the firewire bit? Will the necessary software load up too and maybe I'll just need to update drivers for everything, including the firewire?

I realise that I'll loose Microsoft stuff - which was free at the time but is no longer. Presumably this is not on the recovery disk? Is there a way to copy the Microsoft word/excel etc stuff off and reinstall? I seem to remember its 'enterprise' software that I may have been given a disk of (no longer have it) but I'm not sure.

Anyway, any help and advice welcome.

giraffe69

Can't you use a firewire to usb converter? That avoids the need for re-installing XP and running it on a slow and out of date machine.

EveryWhere

Brand name and full model number?

Norman_Castle

I've had success on a few xp laptops from running malwarebytes then ccleaner. Use ccleaner to remove junk then to disable as much as possible from start up. Google programmes you don't recognise.

JohnB47

giraffe69 wrote: »

Can't you use a firewire to usb converter? That avoids the need for re-installing XP and running it on a slow and out of date machine.

I've read a bit about this but I believe there is no such device that actually works. Do you know of one that does?

giraffe69

Not from personal experience but a quick search reveals you can buy one inexpensively from Amazon and if it fails to work could not doubt be returned

JohnB47

EveryWhere wrote: »

Brand name and full model number?

Its a Toshiba Satellite Pro A100 PSAAPE-00T00Ken

When looking for this info on the underneath of the laptop I also saw a sticker giving a Microsoft/Toshiba Product Key. Presumably that would be for the Windows XP software?

JohnB47

giraffe69 wrote: »

Not from personal experience but a quick search reveals you can buy one inexpensively from Amazon and if it fails to work could not doubt be returned

Thanks but I've just had a real good look on the internet again and I can confirm that there is no such thing as a Firewire to USB adapter or converter.

It's obvious when you think of it - Firewire and USB use completely different languages, so a simple little adapter plug isn't going to do anything - as confirmed by all of the negative reviews of such products. Why does Amazon keep selling these things? A real converter would have to be a unit with it's own inbuilt language conversion software and would probably cost more than just buying a new USB Digital Audio Interface. Presumably that's why one has never been developed.

I'm going to try removing loads of docs, images etc and run CCleaner as suggested by Norman Castle.

EveryWhere

JohnB47 wrote: »

Its a Toshiba Satellite Pro A100 PSAAPE-00T00Ken

When looking for this info on the underneath of the laptop I also saw a sticker giving a Microsoft/Toshiba Product Key. Presumably that would be for the Windows XP software?

If it states that it is for XP Professional, then it is so.
Do you have an XP Professional with SP3 for Toshiba installation disc?

If you would prefer to run a more up to date operating system, I have prepared the suitable firmware update for your machine for the free upgrade to Windows 7;

Download and save these three files;
SATELLITE PRO A100-03R BIOS update files

You'll need an empty USB flash drive. Small capacity is fine.

Plug it into a PC and once installed, download and run Rufus; It's here

When you run it, you'll see an interface similar to this;



Change the Partition scheme and target system type to MBR partition scheme for BIOS

File System to FAT 32

and Format Options to match what is shown on the pic(though you can choose MS-DOS if you wish)

Then you can click Start in order to format and create the bootable USB drive.

Once complete, you can drag the three files that you downloaded earlier on to the drive.

Let me know when you are at that point.

JohnB47

EveryWhere wrote: »

If it states that it is for XP Professional, then it is so.
Do you have an XP Professional with SP3 for Toshiba installation disc?

If you would prefer to run a more up to date operating system, I have prepared the suitable firmware update for your machine for the free upgrade to Windows 7;

Download and save these three files;
SATELLITE PRO A100-03R BIOS update files

You'll need an empty USB flash drive. Small capacity is fine.

Plug it into a PC and once installed, download and run Rufus; It's here

When you run it, you'll see an interface similar to this;



Change the Partition scheme and target system type to MBR partition scheme for BIOS

File System to FAT 32

and Format Options to match what is shown on the pic(though you can choose MS-DOS if you wish)

Then you can click Start in order to format and create the bootable USB drive.

Once complete, you can drag the three files that you downloaded earlier on to the drive.

Let me know when you are at that point.

Wow. Thanks for that. However, I'm not sure I want to go for Windows 7. The only disk I have is labelled:

Product Recovery. For distribution only with a new Toshiba PC. Microsoft Windows XP Professional.

Thanks again for the help. I'll let you know how I get on with creating some space and running CCleaner. Then maybe a defrag of the disk.

esuhl

Not sure if this will be of interest, but, since you have an XP Pro installation CD and product key... You might find nLite interesting.

It allows you to create your own customised installation CD for XP. You can remove unnecessary components and tweak various settings to create a fast/minimalist installation of XP. It's pretty cool.

http://www.nliteos.com/nlite.html

You could always test the installations in a virtual machine (or even test your current XP CD). VirtualBox is free and easy to use:

https://www.virtualbox.org/

But Windows 7 is worth considering if you can get it free -- it's more secure than XP, and runs the latest versions of web browsers (like Firefox, etc.).