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XP HORROR STORIES


wizardofwindows

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Never had one, XP has been the best OS Microsoft has ever released.

If I had anything to complain about it's the ignorant myths that XP is slower than 2000, or uses more RAM than 2000 when these people merely hit CTRL-ALT-DEL and took the ram used at face value (every heard of caching and precaching people?)

The same thing happened all over again with SP2, people were quick to claim they'd never install it and it proved itself to be the best thing to ever happen to XP.

My point is, I'm sick of the users with their head up their arse, not the OS.

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Well I can contribute a Win2k horror story. With 2k you need SP2 or SP3 I don't remember, for support of large harddisk with more than 137GB (48bit LBA). So I installed Win2k without 48bit LBA support on my 250GB harddrive.

I had one 6GB partition for windows and the rest of the disk as one big large partition almost full with data. Well guess what happened? I wanted to install SP4 so I could access my large partition without risk, it just happened that the SP4 setup extracted itself onto the large partition without prior asking, and rendered the partition inaccessible, nearly 200GB data gone. :thumbup:realmad:

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How many do you want?

There was the time the registry got corrupted by a bad sector - result spontaneous reboots. Booting using last known config didn't work as it copied the backup registry over a bad sector each time. 3 hours of chkdsk /R later I got the machine working again.

Then their was the time my ntuser.dat file got corrupted, got locked out of my profile for another 3 hours while chkdsk /R was running.

Then their was the time XP decided to remove my entire profile, I lost all files on my desktop, all emails and my favourites as well as all the documents in 'My Documents'.

Then their was the time I uninstalled my nforce2 drivers to install a new set, it removed a required file which on rebooting to install the new drivers I was informed 'a required file is missing', tried to 'boot from last known configuration' - still no go and so I had to install XP onto another drive with the old driver set just to get one .sys file to allow my original installation to boot up.

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I installed Windows XP to see what it was like and to my horror I saw a big ugly interface that I later learned was known as "Luna".
Love it or hate it, the public likes eye candy, and the public accounts for 99% of the users.
There was the time the registry got corrupted by a bad sector...
That's a faulty HD, not a faulty OS at work. A horror story indeed, I just hope you don't blame XP for this as it would be no difference than saying you had custom leather seats installed in your car and on a hot Florida day they caught fire and burnt your entire car so BMW is a horrible company :)
Then their was the time XP decided to remove my entire profile...
Remove your profile? There's no way XP did this on it's own, in fact there's no option for it anywhere. Sounds like spyware/virus or a 3rd party app of some kind. Perhaps the same faulty HD?
Then their was the time I uninstalled my nforce2 drivers to install a new set...
I've read people talk about un-installing drivers before installing new versions but from personal experience and from driver experts I've insist you DO NOT un-install older drivers. I'd say this is even more true for system critical things such as your motherboard drivers.

----------

I do have 1 horror story but it's from Win2k but I think we can all agree that Win2k was great for it's time but it wasn't as feature rich as it could have been (MS does have deadlines). I love XP because it's basically all the things they wanted to put "under the hood" into 2000 but didn't have the time to finish.

Anyways, I wanted to upgrade my PC so I swapped out my motherboard/CPU/ram and when I put the new board in I was unable to boot up, BSOD every time. I had to re-install the OS (the partition was fine, just the OS was fubar).

That's when I learned how system critical motherboard chip set drivers were as I had switched from a board that was using an Intel chip set to one that used a VIA chip set. Obviously this wouldn't have been a problem if my new board had a similar chip set but I have heard this issue has been remedied in XP but I haven't tested it yet.

Ultimately it was a learning experience, it helped me get to where I am now in understanding Windows.

BTW: has anybody noticed there's more Win2k horror stories than XP, and the only XP stories weren't even XP's fault (as I stated in a previous quote).

Edited by Rhelic
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:whistle: there was a time i had to switch back to 98se because of hardware drivers only worked on 98se lol what a horrible 20 minutes i cryed i weeped nashing of the teeth then i switch video cards and hello luna.Luna aint so bad if you watch fisher price commericals with your 3yr old.lol Seriously i use the royal theme.and i got neptune to install first try but 2000 still hates me. P.S i like 98se dont flame me mgdx lol j/k whos up next? Edited by timeless
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For XP itself and something that is purely XP's fault, the only thing I can think of is with a friend of mine. On his laptop, any media file that he right-clicks on gives him an explorer crash. His system is completely virus/malware free and he stays on top of Windows Updates. He ended up restoring from the IBM image... :whistle:

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yeah, i have a few!

when i installed, the product wanted to be activated. no prob. we have a volume license. i had a retail version that i'd slipstreamed sp2 with and microsoft assured me on the phone all would be well. it wasn't. after install #3 in refused subsequent installs. another call to microsoft and the techs were saying no, doing that won't work even though yes, the activation people have been saying that volume licensing keys would in fact work (keep in mind this is not corporate ed., this volume license did require a key). well, can you please get these folks to stop telling people this, i asked, as i sighed thinking about the reformatting i had to do. the really sad part? the same thing happened with office xp's activation, only i used the volume license key that time. heh, guess what. but this is about xp. so, continuing on...

to my non-delight, i discovered xp tried to be 'helpful' to my nt4 server by converting NTFS 4 to 5.1 without lettin' me know. i'm glad i didn't need to go back to nt4 because xp would bsod on this legacy hardware*. oh, wait, i DID need to go back! fixed with partition magic, but not... very... nice. (*the complaint is NOT with xp causing the BSODs, it was faulty hardware that NT4 was simply more tolerant of. the problem was xp's converting not only the boot volume (that's easy, you can reformat), but every other NTFS 4 volume on the machine. making my server's data temporarily inaccessible.)

i installed xp, and when i hit Windows + F to find something, a dog came up! (yeah, i know he can be removed. i hate having to access google to find out which reg key to edit every time i sit at an xp user's machine).

i installed xp and like I_Broke_My_MHZ, i also discovered "a big ugly interface that I later learned was known as 'Luna'." (note to Rhelic, 1) it's a horror story nonetheless, doesn't matter what ms thinks the public wants, and 2) i LOVE your avatar, heh heh

a friend's laptop slowed to a crawl after uninstalling a few programs. found out about this caching stuff and solved that. not truly horror like the dog, but annoying.

once copied the system32 directory to the D:\ drive to do a quick backup and later to my delight i found xp would not let me delete the directory, saying it was protected. from D:\, not the boot drive. 2k never did that. i had to remedy that one with knoppix.

when i installed things in xp, it would re-arrange items in my start menu. where's network neighborhood? what is this 'shared files' thing -- where did that come from? i later discovered these were some kinds of 'features.' (hey, this is MY horror story post :P )

i set up xp in a public place for a group of users and when one went to plug their USB keychain into xp, i found i had to type the admin login and password in order to let them do it. repeat for every single user. didn't have that with win2k! tried to set the security policy for the user group to fix this. never did find that one out. i was too busy being baffled over adding new users and adjusting their account rights which i figured out, but still not the 'giving USB to users' thing. win2k was straightforward.

a memory use discussion is going on here. i'm not gonna mention how slow my machine became with that interface running. and terminal services (can i please have a choice whether to run it at boot, perhaps by holding a down down maybe i can skip loading it?*) or how hard it is to remove ie, unlike removing ie from win2k or the defragger always running in the background? i think i can maybe handle defragging myself thanks. that only caused a few DVD coasters til i shut it off with a reg hacj, IIRC. (*yeah, i KNOW terminal services is necessary for the pretty picture login and 'login as alternate user.' but i would expect it to be easily disabled if i don't use these. without having to use nlite.)

upgrading some new components? remember to back up your activation data, because you'll have to re-activate. (a new mobo will require a re-installation. you only get a few mobo upgrades, because at some point, believe me, your activation key will no longer be accepted by the ms database).

well this was kinda fun. i don't have time to heap more onto my list but i am sure i'll think of more later....

cheers to all and remember this is a horror story thread

Edited by fdv
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Horror stories? y not, i got 2 of them,

Remember blaster worm! That worm that almost knocked out everyones PC's for a long time. OMG i had so much trouble removing that thing! I ACTULLY HAD TO CALL IN THE ARMY TO FIX MY COMPUTER (well almost, i knew someone whoes a computer a bigger computer geek that i am in the army ;) and he fixed it up for me)

and...

My friend downloaded SP2 and got there whole hard disk deleted, it said "Starting Memmory dump" and everything was GONE! $200.00 to fix :o

Edited by wolf7448
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  • 2 weeks later...

As always, disclaimer I work for MS support.

Just for reference, explorer.exe can (and does) run non-microsoft code. Since it's just the "wrapper" that launches all of the other goodies that display the user shell, get perm settings from GPO's, start user applications, verify registry settings, etc., it can also launch and be the parent of third-party applications - and when those apps crash, it's explorer.exe that LOOKS like it crashed (because the third-party app crashed and almost always brings down it's parent). To be honest, the absolute biggest problem with Windows systems is (irony drum beating here) antivirus software. :crazy:

Oh, and that's usually the reason why, after explorer.exe respawns after it crashes, that you may be missing icons from your taskbar (make sense now?).

Edited because I can't spell :).

Edited by cluberti
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Yeah, no real horror stories for me with XP.. I liked 2k.. I really like XP... Same annoying problem with setup trying to isntall winodws to D: or E: etc instead of C: when it sees a zip drive or some other removeable usb drive.. 2k did that to though with enough drivers during setup..

Otherwise.. XP is very nice compared to 2k.. And 2k and Xp are far supperior to 9x and nt 4.x and older..

Wish xp and xp-64 were in the same NT version instead of xp being 5.1 and xp-64 begin nt 5.2 like windows 2003.. Otherwise, still like it over xp-64 even.

Haha. Update..

Was browsing hotfixes today, and MS have gotten a few complaints (or whatever you want to call it)

They have a KB article in regards to picking drive letters during setup.

http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=896536

Edited by bilemke
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One time I had a partitioned filled with all of my backup files from CD's I've thrown away to save space. So then one day I have some problems with an old installation of XP, so I decided to start fresh. I boot up the XP CD, which then gives me the choice of managing my partitions. I didn't pay much attention to that screen, but since in XP my drive letter for my backup partition was D:\, I deleted that partition. Then I create a new partition over the deleted one to install XP on. So when I load up my fresh XP, I find that I'm given a choice of two OS's, both of which are Windows XP, so I thought it must've been an error on XP Setup's fault, only to find my storage partition gone when I login :'(.

Edited by Aegis
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