Archive for August, 2008
XP reinstall
What a pain it was to reinstall windows! I had a Dell Latitude D410 that was having all kinds of weirdness. It couldn’t find any network shares, and the DNS would just fail to lookup random sites.
Anyways, I backed up everything and did a clean install from a Dell Windows XP with SP2 CD I have. First thing, install the wireless driver and I could browse shares again. Oh, get this I got a new Dual 2.4ghz & 5ghz wireless AP. I set it up to use WPA(2)-PSK which uses AES & TKIP… apparently the TKIP wasn’t working quite right. When using TKIP I kept getting messages like “the network has been compromised and will be disabled for a few minutes” WTF right? It’s some feature of TKIP where if a few packets are not verified, it changes the key and all clients stop working for a while! Switching to just AES fixed this.
Anyways, back to the Dell. After installing the wireless driver, I installed SP3, this worked fine, but I couldn’t install any updates after, they all downloaded but then failed. I found the fix on this site: http://blog.taylex.com/post/2008/05/Windows-Update-fails-after-SP3-Installation.aspx to work great and finished installing all the updates. I’m re-installing all the other apps now.
But sheesh, how would a non-technical user figure this stuff out?
No comments