My nearly 4 year old PC is getting tired so I have a new m'board, CPU, hard drive and memory on order. I took another look at Vista and decided to stick with my 7 year old XP Pro.
A couple of good pieces of freeware.
Nlite:
I made a slipstreamed CD of SP3 and my 7 or 8 year old Windows XP SP using Nlite. Contrary to what a lot of people say, you can go directly form the original XP to SP3.
Nlite is really useful. Not only did it do a good job of slipstreaming SP3 into the original XP, it lets you get rid of XP add-ins, widgets, services, etc that you don't want. Before I burned my slipstreamed CD, I got rid of over 500 items from XP (200+MB). It was mostly stuff I never used or didn't know how to get rid of before. There is about 200 keyboard options, maybe a hundred language variations and a boatload of other useless stuff as well as many services that never get used. It also lets you enter your software Key and personal information so that it does a hands off installation. I'm going to send Nlite some money.
I wanted to test it before I got my new hardware but didn't want to wipe out my existing XP installation, so I downloaded Windows Virtual machine from MS, another freebie. With a virtual You can run a second, third or ... operating system on the same computer and they are isolated from each other, although you can switch back and forth with a hot key combination. This was my first experiancce with virtual machine software, it looks like a safe way to try new software or operating systems and it's easy.
A couple of good pieces of freeware.
Nlite:
I made a slipstreamed CD of SP3 and my 7 or 8 year old Windows XP SP using Nlite. Contrary to what a lot of people say, you can go directly form the original XP to SP3.
Nlite is really useful. Not only did it do a good job of slipstreaming SP3 into the original XP, it lets you get rid of XP add-ins, widgets, services, etc that you don't want. Before I burned my slipstreamed CD, I got rid of over 500 items from XP (200+MB). It was mostly stuff I never used or didn't know how to get rid of before. There is about 200 keyboard options, maybe a hundred language variations and a boatload of other useless stuff as well as many services that never get used. It also lets you enter your software Key and personal information so that it does a hands off installation. I'm going to send Nlite some money.
I wanted to test it before I got my new hardware but didn't want to wipe out my existing XP installation, so I downloaded Windows Virtual machine from MS, another freebie. With a virtual You can run a second, third or ... operating system on the same computer and they are isolated from each other, although you can switch back and forth with a hot key combination. This was my first experiancce with virtual machine software, it looks like a safe way to try new software or operating systems and it's easy.
