Lee.org

A month or so ago I did an upgrade installation from Windows 2000 to Windows XP. It sucked. Windows ran slow, there was this persistent hesitation problem where the machine would lock up for 5 seconds out of every 10 minutes… My computer wasn’t happy. So when I got the 200 gig hard drive, I decided to do an install from scratch. You know, ever since Windows 95, it’s been “a good idea” to reinstall Windows every 2 years or so. What’s with that??

The only problem I’ve had so far is that Maxtor insisted that I use their Maxblast3 formatting software and not the XP formatting tool. That’s kind of funny because I banged my head against a wall of “Windows could not start because the following file is missing or corrupt | \system32\hal.dll | Please reinstall a copy of the above file” BECAUSE of the Maxblast3 software” for 4 hours because of that bad suggestion. To get around this problem, I booted to my old XP and formatted the 200 gig drive with Windows and Partition Magic 7. After that, I installed WinXP on the new drive just fine. Patting myself on the back, I figured that one out all by myself.

My Windows XP install is now snazzy-fast :-)