abhisarda's Journal: some observations made while installing xp

I recently upgraded my motherboard and AGP card.

Earlier I had a mobo with integrated graphics and therefore did not need a AGP card. Went and bought a GeforceMX400(original Nvidia- a dell pull for 30 $). Little did i know that this mobo had a ISA slot instead of AGP.

So went back to the comp shop and got a new mobo. Came home and the xp kept freezing up 10 min after I used it. Really frustrating.

2 days I tried to figure out what the problem was. Went back to the comp shop and checked the cpu(fine), agp card(fine) so the mobo was faulty. The computer guy didnt agree and I had to show him some 5 times that xp was freezing even after using a diff agp card.

I also changed my heatsink(was rated for 750 or 800 Mhz and I have 850 Athlon) with one that is good till 1.7 Athlon. Also returned 3 mice and got a new logitech optical USB. nice. Finally on Sat evening, the comp was working fine with a new mobo.

I used win 98 se for a few months here before upgrading to xp. I did not do a clean install and just chose the upgrade option. Probably not a good idea.

1)I installed IE 6.x in win 98se. The bug in this was that whenever I clicked on a link to open on a new page, the new page would turn out to be blank.(Microsoft Knowledge Base Article - 281679
). I searched for a solution high and low for 4 days before somebody in IRC pointed out the MS knowledge base article.

I finally did a clean install of xp with the new mobo. Now xp works like a charm.

The boot time is shorter by some 5-8 sec compared to my old mobo. Not sure if the clean install of xp is also responsible for this.

When xp was installed over 98, there was a problem with hibernate mode. When I selected hibernate mode and the put the comp to hibernation, then when I restarted the comp, it would log in to my account automatically. It would not show the login screen. It was irritating.

When I used netscape to view photos, saving them would take atleast 5 sec even after I downloaded them in win 98/win98-xp upgrade.
Now after the clean install of xp, it takes .5 sec to save the photos.

About the USB mouse, its got a ps/2 connector too. I removed the ps/2 connector and plugged the mouse in the USB port. xp would just hang. After a clean install of xp, USB works just fine.

One bad option in the new install of xp is Java. Since java is not loaded in IE, I had to d/l it seperately. And yahoo pool does'nt come up as good as it used to in 98. Just have to bear with it. Don't play it as much these days as I used to earlier.