Ponch

I could be wrong about this, but I think with laptops with built-in WiFi that the antenna is hidden behind the display, The old school WiFi add-in cards, for laptops without built-in WiFi, also had antennas sticking out of the card. Cheers and Regards Desktop cases are metal, laptop screen bezels are plastic, that will be the difference. You need something sticking out the Faraday cage.

Is your starting OS not supposed to be on more than 1cd ? Is it an original XP MCE ? Can you check both your starting and resulting cd with a program like "cdcheck" there is a portable version (no install) here.

As requested by the big red message up your screen, please attach (not paste) the file "last session.ini" thas sits in your resulting folder. Also attaching the said txtsetup.sif would help. When exactly did you get that message that "you can't remember exactly" ? If you burned several cds with different methods, did you get that message each times ? At what point exactly do you get the "txtsetup.sif" error ?

Yes. You just run the exe file.

A 3rd advice: 1) It depends entirely on what options of the program you use. Some are harmless some are radical. If you remove components, some can be re-added some cannot,... better be safe than sorry. 2) This is rubbish as nLite simply does NOT partition or rather does NOT support (read "add option for") unattended partitioning, there is no way it would do it "not well". It is a clear decision from the author. I take it the info you read was confusing or plainly wrong or you didn't really understand what it meant. Booting from you new cd, you would be able to partition your disk exactly like with a standard XP.3) Simply boot your new comp with a standard XP, and get to the partitioning bit. If it shows your HDD and existing partitions (if any), bingo, you are lucky and don't need additional SAT drivers. If it won't, you can retry after changing bios options like said in posts above. If you still can't see the HDD from the XP disk, you can either use the floppy ("F6") option (if you can have one physically plugged in) or you'll have to consider nLite or other options for that. This test will take 7 minutes of your time. 4) ... check "5" from the 1st answer. Also more in general, as stated or not by the 2 other posters. -The idea behind nLite was to be able to reinstall ("for the enthusiastic hobbyist") as easily as possible. If you do all the work but install only once, it won't be much time gain, at the contrary. Though you might gain some megabytes on your HDD post install (obviously the whole nLite thing will use loads of megabytes on the "preparing" PC, but that you can get rid of.. later at some point). Don't get me wrong, if you feel like you'll enjoy doing it and you have time, you can try. -Removing lots of things from XP might have been be useful when installing on a sub 8Gig HDD, which you are not. -integrating program add-ons is in my view pointless as most of them (Flash, Firefox, Java, and other) will become obsolete in a few weeks and need reinstall anyway. Someone even created an add-on for McAffee Stinger which is a 1file standalone Anti-Virus tool that's updated several times a week see what I mean ? -Good luck for your install. Don't forget that MS XP does comes with a license, be careful posting border line info about what you install on what machine.

Little update on the .m3u ability; unlike the MediaPlayers on computers I use (Winamp or 1by1 for instance), the car system can't find the files that are not in the folder or subfolders where the .m3u file sits. So you have to create the m3u in the root of your music folder for it to "see" everything. -> "Compatibility" is not 100%.

Reading again I might have jumped to conclusions. It's not clear whether for instance the last unalocated bit was inside or out the extended partition. But you should see that on the graphic. edit;... yes it is, from the numbers, it is inside the extended. Anyway, run GPartEd again to see if it doesn't give any warning about partitions mismatch. Check that only the 1st partition is active. Have you created that big 79Gig partition with XP or with GParted ? Are you sure your XP is SP2 (or above)?

Now we get it. You had 1primary partition (C:) 1Extended partition containing 3 logical partitions; -D: (now empty space), E: and F: So C: and D: were contiguous in a way but D: was contained in an extended partition, which makes a direct merge impossible. What you have to do is -shrink the "Extended Partition" (what you see as 2nd lign in your post) from the beginning (move the left part of the frame that contains E: and F: to the right as far as you can go, that is to the beginning of E:) -create a new partition in the freed space. If there is no reason for those lost 10Gig at the end, you can also extend the end of that Extended partition and when you've done that, extend the F: partition so that it includes the free space. In fact all those operation should not take that long as they wouldn't physically move any data. Again, I call them C: D: E: and F: to refer to them as you saw them first, but those are names given by Windows. GPartEd won't use those letters and simply show them as partitions or free spaces.

What you describe is not obvious stuff. If you really installed XP on all 4 partitions with "as low knowledge as you claim to have", you 'd have a multiboot of some sort, probabl on the C: drive that you now ...deleted, so with what you describe it is very difficult for us to visualize how your system really runs. Hopefully the few info I gave are enough for you to go on. Fact is, if you have 4 XP installs, the letters probably do not refer to the same partitions depending what XP is running.

I don't think you need to redo anything, just use the Last Session only in a later session. 1st integrate SP3 (with nLite or manually), then restart nLite with the Last session as parameters. The explanation(or bug) is this; nLite compares what's in the XP files to what's to be removed (from the Last session you load) and sort of makes a resulting "temporary session" of what's to perform. In you case, if language X is not in XP SP2 but the Last session says "add SP3 then remove language X", nLite will translate to "Add SP3 and ignore this language that doesn't exist cause I can't find it here". Then when nLite has added SP3, it shows the language as being present and you can remove it but manually, that's why it will be listed again in the newly saved Last session at the end of processing. So again, the solution is Add SP3 before loading Last session.

Are you now ?

So you mean C and D were not contiguous ? That is not standard situation so we couldn't guess. You can use tools like GPartEd (bootable CD or USB drive) to move partitions and so make a contiguous unpartitioned space. It takes quite a long time. Or you could image your 2 remaining partitions to an other drive or external location, repartition your HDD then re-image them on the 1st drive. It is more secure and might be faster but you need to have an imaging program, understand how it works and what it does and have available free space (at least the size of the data on E: and F:) somewhere. There is a sticky about imaging softwares in the "Software" forum.

Edit. ... nothing to add here. My answer was for a laptop.

I don't know where you work but most computer's do go Sleep Mode at times. Not because it's a good idea but because it's the (MS) default mode and "Power Options" is far from a priority for Sys Admins.

This bit is very ambiguous. First, you can't "start Windows from the cd". Also, either you formatted C: and D: or you deleted C: and D:. In case you deleted both your question is very easily answered, you have a big unpartitionned space and make one partition that takes all that space. In case you formatted C: and D:, you (also) just need to delete the two partitions, then recreate one that takes all the freed space. You can do all that from the XP CD. Note that after reinstallation (I guess that it is your idea), the E: and F: letters will be shifted to D: and E: This can easily be fixed in "Disk Management" (if needed).

So that one was a no no from the start. Try the 3rd ? There are still plenty of them on Ebay. Later versions have a physical switch to turn the WiFi on/off, I wish I had chosen one like that.

I think I've got one at my father's too, that's in Belgium. I got it from eBay and did a firmware update. If I remember, there was a "UK only" firmware for that model, so maybe you do have a wrong firmware. Is the line not "destroyed by the lightning" ? The "i" led should only shine when the adsl connection is OK. Edit; there are numerous versions of that "DG834". Check here. For the one I got, the firmware is from 2006 and it's either "UK only" or the rest. Is it possible that your mother didn't plug the cable the right way ? Or After the adsl filter ?

You just point nLite to the CAB file and/or the 7z file. Do not extract them.

If flashing under Windows was so dangerous, they'd stop making it possible. After all, Bios updates are mostly needed in the first months a machine is out, and under warranty. I've flashed more than hundred Dells under Windows, only one ever froze.

Or don't be paranoid.

You can use "Add and Remove Windows components" on a few things but there is not much gain from it. With a 200Gig HDD you have plenty of space. 512 MB of DDR1, that's quite low today. Even for XP you'd see a big difference upping it to 1or 1.5Gig. Unfortunately that could cost around 20$, unless you get lucky on ebay.

To sum it up, Your box was sold with an OEM Windows 2000 Pro license the school bought a VLK upgrade license which allow them to install XP on a given amount of machine without having to activate (that's the point of VLK, it is not double license, it's the key to do those "activation-less" install). The school sold the machine as is and without install media, that's two mistakes. You're left with either -reinstall Windows 2000 if you own (or buy, or borrow, but ...officially ...not copy it) a Win2000 media. Using the key on the sticker or finding the pre-activated key for Compaq Win2000 Pro and a Compaq Media that goes with it. Good luck with that. -keep the actual install as a Ghost image as backup and if you feel the need to, shrink the partition. Ghost and GPartEd are 2easy solutions. Ghost is more secure IMHO and probably faster. GParted is free. Keep in mind that a normal XP install would need at least 15 of those 40Gig if you don't want the PC to crawl on a full partition within 3 years. Being a Windows 2000 box it will be a ~1GHz machine with probably 256Meg of RAM if not less.

I found an old mail while cleaning a mailbox at work that was talking about "the problem..." opening PDF files in IE on PCs with Adobe Acrobat 6 installed. Clearly the culprit. Glad it is solved.

If the MS guy did not tell, I won't tell either, but ... The VLK is probably used on top of an OEM license. The OEM license is tied to the PC and the VLK license is tied to the school. You can't "use" as in "reuse" the VLK license as you're not from the school. You're on the thin line here. Either you Ghost the partition to a smaller one or you could try to find out if the PC had an OEM preactivated install before it was reinstall by the school. What brand is it ? Does it have a sticker ?

If you ever come back, please share your solution like you would have liked us to. You could also edit the 1st post as to add "[solved]" to the tittle.