Hi, adv 98SE PU banging my head against XP Home

[imwaiting]

Hi everyone,

With 98SE I was a wiz at making legacy MS-DOS apps and hardware run as bullet proof as possible on 9x systems. Especially a former employer's medical products developed for the AT, using IRQ2, Adlib sound card calls, and IRQ5/7 parallel port I/O in a what needed to be a real time environment.

Trying to upgrade the home system to XP Home was an eyeopener. Destroyed the installation trying to move things around, installing before getting rid of Roxio, etc. With my past experience, I can't believe I didn't research the upgrade before trying it. Very happy to have found the unattended web site.

Goals

Install XP home and as many apps the way I want on two hard drives, ready to use

Wish list.

One or two admin accts, one power user account, two user accounts, maybe a guest account.

Classic Windows, Classic Start menu and search functions, but with users allowed to change the look of their desktops, no help assistant to start, show all files, show all extensions, no address bar, full path in title bar, details, except for special folders like control panel.

All users with access to Office 2000 Pro, Firefox, Nero, Paint Shop Pro, Xnews, Acrobat Reader, an FTP program and few other programs, including some of the games, PFE as the default text editor, instead of Notepad. Don't know if I want to use Outlook 2000 since I would only be using it with the gmail pop server. ??Use windows messenger instead for users to leave each other messages instead of web email?

Two users with access to engineering/design/analysis software, Autocad 2000, Project 2000, Visio 2000, Acrobat 4.01, Mathematica and Matlab

One user with access to Visual Studio 2000, Partition Magic

Be able to network (peer to peer?) with a rebuild of an ancient system with 98SE, a future laptop and a future workstation. The corporate laptop is set up to preclude adding another network.

the following partitioning scheme

Disk 0

C: OS and minimal pagefile for dump

D: Program files

Disk 1

E: Main Pagefile

F: Print spool

G: Temp files, caches, browser history, bookmarks/favorites, cookies

H: Data, including Documents and Settings folders

Be able to restore the system from any future potential disasters, and/or move to a larger hard drive.

As I replace drives with larger ones, I may want to look at multiboot options with boot partitions that can be hidden and swapped around for having a "clean" configuration for testing, and maybe for playing with other OSs.

My current resources:

Broadband cable

You ;-)

A corporate laptop with XP pro and a vetted SP2 pack (since we use Seibel and some security software not compatible with all the hotfixes.), with a hardrive big enough to image a dvd/cd, .NET framework 1.1 so I can't use that nLite program.

The old Gateway with 98SE, 512k RAM, 13 GB and 40 GB hard drives, CD ROM, DVD Burner, etc.

The new upgrade XP Home with /SP2 CD

downloaded drivers for XP from Gateway, but the Sneaky packs looks promising.

McAffee AntiVirus

Paritition Magic (Synantec's new one)

Nero 7

Office 2000 professional upgrade(original disks lost) Office 95 Pro as qualifier

Honeycutt's Windows Registry Guide 2d edition (great book!) So I will be attempting to load the hive files from the installation CD and then editing them with my attempts at inf files for preferences, default profiles, and security settings, then unloading them back to the CD image.

Been researching this for month since the original upgrade disaster, only one install was activated, so I guess I have one practice run available and one final.

Done with the Beginner unattended image, including the hotfixes placed in winnt.sif, and the SrvPack folder, working through the intermediate and looking at the tales of woe for unattended Office 2000 with service packs and a possible incompatibility with Autocad 2000 (didn't have any problems on 98SE with them coexisting)

Ready to vent frustrations in a Pournelle Chaos Manor style, sharing successes and failures, as time permits.

Any help, tips, words of encouragement appreciated.

[mark]

Welcome to MSFN imwaiting.

You will find what you appreciate in the forums.

DL